The end of the Angela Merkel era

Reflections of a journalist in Berlin

The Angela Merkel era in Germany will end when voters there go to the polls on Sunday September 26. An East German pastor’s daughter, she became Chancellor on November 22, 2005. At 51 she was the youngest person ever to hold that office, she was also the first woman and the first former East German.

She remains as much of an enigma as when she stepped on to the German political stage in the 1990s.