Two German women straddle Europe

One has made Germany the greatest of Europe’s nations and the other heads the European Union. Hence we too, though far removed, are interested in them, particularly those of us who believe that women, very often, do better than men in even the political sphere.

Angela Merkel

Angela Dorothea Merkel has held the exalted position of Chancellor of Germany since 2005. She served as Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2005 and as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 2000 to 2018. A member of the CDU, Merkel is the first female Chancellor of Germany. And it wasn’t easy to get there. For one thing she was from East Germany and came to politics in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was underlying resentment of women holding top jobs so she lost her bid for chancellorship once, before she won it in 2005. She entered the government of East Germany and was elected to be the government spokesperson. With the unification of East and West Germany, she was elected to the Bundestag under Chancellor Helmut Kohl and was Minister of Women and Youth; later Minister of Environment and Reactor Safety.

She definitely broke the glass ceiling and then retained her popularity as head of Germany from the start. Instead of the word ‘retained’, the phrase ‘gained increasing popularity and approbation’ would be more apt. Consider that when she gave up heading her party the CDU and the Chancellorship, she was given a countrywide six minute applause in the Bundestag and in homes and offices. Many leaders are booted out and hooted too. Not this great lady who steered a disparate combination of prosperous postwar West Germany with an economically and communist East to become the most forceful nation in the entirety of Europe and economically stablest. Angela remained outstanding in any forum of world leaders; certainly not for her appearance or dress but for her personality and sincerity. Her humanness was shown when she was on the fringe of a group of leaders – Trudeau, Johnson and Macron – and amused, we presume, when they were ‘caught’ commenting on Trump’s bluster at the meeting of world leaders. He left that meeting the next day in high dudgeon.

In 2015 she showed humanitarianism in taking in refugees – 890,000 in all – from Islamic countries fleeing persecution in the Middle East. She would surely have known it was a risky move and she would be heavily criticized, but she led Europe in this humanitarian act.

Angela was born on July 17, 1954 in Hamburg, Germany, to a Lutheran pastor in East Germany, sympathetic to the Communist regime. Angela entered the University of Leipzig in1973 and earned her doctorate in physics in 1978. She had married Chemistry Professor Ulrich Merkel in 1977 but divorced in 1982. She wed Joachim Sauer in 1998.

During 18 years of leading Germany and its 80 million Germans with competence, skill, dedication and sincerity, no transgressions were recorded against her. She did not assign any of her relatives to high posts, not even secretarial. “She did not claim that she was the maker of glories”. She did not utter nonsense, nor seek popularity. It just came to her. She was dubbed “The Lady of the World” and was described as the equivalent of six million men.    Germany stood as one body bidding farewell to the leader of Germany a short time ago, a chemical physicist who was not tempted by fashion or the limelight and did not buy real estate, cars, yachts and private planes. At a press conference, a female journalist asked Merkel: We notice that your suit is repeated, don’t you have another?   She replied: I am a government employee and not a model. At another press conference, she was asked: Do you have housemaids who clean the house, prepare meals and so on?    Her answer was: No, I do not have domestic workers and I do not need them.  My husband and I do all the work at home every day. Even the laundry is a shared chore. The couple live in an ordinary apartment like any other; the same she lived in before being elected Head of Germany. She owns next to nothing. We wonder what her future will be. You just cannot keep an efficient woman down!

Ursula von der Leyen

In July 2019, the European Council nominated Ursula von der Leyen to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker, and was elected 13th President of the European Commission by the European Parliament on 16 July. She assumed office on December 1, 2019, following the approval of the European Parliament.

There is a connection between the first great woman I write about and this woman. Born Ursula Gertrude Albrecht on October 8, 1958 in Belgium, she is German. Her father was one of the first European Union civil servants who later took to German politics moving to Hanover in 1971. Ursula became a medical physician in 1986 in Hanover and a year later married fellow physician Heiko Von der Leyen. She studied economics at the London School of Economics in the late 1970s using the name Rose Landson, the family name of her great grandmother who was from Charleston, South Carolina. She spent time in Stanford, California, in the 1990s where her husband was in the University, specializing. They have seven children.

In late 1990, Ursula entered politics in Germany and served under Merkel. She was favoured to succeed Merkel as Chancellor of Germany and also to be the Secretary General of NATO. But nominated by the European Council she assumed office as the President of the European Commission and that’s when we saw this very beautiful, poised and fully confident woman, yet very feminine, on the world stage. She was seen at Brexit negotiations in both Brussels and London. Remembered with amusement is her mild and mannerly gesturing by hand to Boris Johnson to keep the mandatory distance when she and he faced the media at one of the negotiations late last year.

Ursula von der Leyan has many more miles to travel, as Robert Frost noted in his poem Stopping by the Woods… Her smart femininity, her slim figure though the mother of seven children, is remarkable. She too is an upwardly mobile woman who somewhat straddles the world stage, playing an important role.

Cannot keep an outstanding woman down!

Michelle Obama proves this. She shares centre stage with two puppets in the Netflix series of films that attempts to teach children the joy of home cooking – a way to wean kids off fast food. Titled Waffles + Mochi, the ex First Lady and two puppets travel the world trying out recipes. She has always been concerned about children and said of the film: “I only wish Waffles and Mochi had been around when my daughters were growing up.”