PERSON OF THE YEAR THE CHOICE ANGELA MERKEL

The German chancellor, whose leadership has helped preserve and promote an open, borderless Europe in the face of economic turmoil and an ongoing refugee crisis, is TIME’s 2015 Person of the Year
Fairy tales are where you find them, but any number seem to begin in the dark German woods where Angela Merkel spent her childhood.

The girl who would grow up to be called the most powerful woman in the world came of age in a glade dappled by the northern sun and shadowed by tall pines.

Merkel remained a captive for the first 35 years of her life, biding her time. As an adult, she lived in East Berlin, riding an elevated train beside the barricade whose 1961 construction she recalled as the first political memory of her life. When it fell in 1989, she gathered the qualities cultivated as a necessity in the East—patience, blandness, intellectual rigor and an inconspicuous but ferocious drive—and changed not only her life but the course of history.

The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades. The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling crisis over the euro, the currency shared by 19 nations, all of which were endangered by the default of a single member, Greece. Its resolution came at the signature plodding pace that so tries the patience of Germans that they have made it a verb:Merkeling.

The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. Thatarrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well? - Read More at the EIME

TIME Person of the Year 2015: Angela Merkel

Why Angela Merkel Is TIME's Person of the Year 2015 - Nancy Gibbs

How Germany Reacted to Angela Merkel as TIME's Person of the Year