(Newswire.net — December 10, 2015) — The Time has decided who the first woman of the year since 1986 is:It is Angela Merkel, German lady chancellor. Her accomplishments are many, but here are some like her firm determination to lead Europe all the way during the Greek crisis, which was so far the greatest threat to survival of the European Union or insisting and negotiating with other members of EU to open their borders and receive refugees and migrants from war zones of Middle East and Asia.
The Time opened this contest 79 years ago, in 1936 and since then, Ms Merkel is the fourth woman to be honored with this title. At the beginning of this year Time said:” Merkel had already emerged as the indispensable player in managing Europe’s serial debt crisis. She also led the West’s response to Vladimir Putin’s creeping theft of Ukraine”.
It is true that the crisis with Greece was a major one and it could have brought the end of the Europen Union if it wasn’t for Merkel. She also contributed to opening European borders to migrants anfd refugees although most European countries were not exactly against it, but they surely would not have admitted so many of them on their territories; so it is no wonder that the refugees call her ‘Mama Merkel’. It is well desrved title also, since if it wasn’t for her, they would have hardly seen anything of Europe.
It is said that Merkel was using “the politics of baby steps’. She was progressing slowly, but steadily starting from a quantum chemist, climbing up through ranks and ending up as a chancellor in 2005. The Time depicted her ten years of rule as ‘resolutely dull’.
This year was the biggest test for Merkel, being the year of the greatest challenges for Europe. Time editor Nancy Gibs said on Wednesday:” Leaders are tested only when people don’t want to follow.. For asking more of her country than most politicians would dare, for standing firm against tyranny as well as expedience and for providing steadfast moral leadership in a world where it is in short supply, Angela Merkel is Time’s Person of the Year. We call her the chancellor of the free world”.
German chancellor can speak Russian, she lacks vanity, she lives quite an ordinary life in her flat in Berlin, with her husband scientist; she shops in an ordinary store and when she manages to go on holiday, she goes hiking somewhere in the Alps.
It is noted that her speeches are usually very monotonous and she often looks weird when in front of the camera, but why German people are delighted with her is this very ordinariness and competence which are highly valued with the Germans.
The other nominees were Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, ISIS extremist group leader, Hassan Rouhani, Iranian president, America Black Lives Matter activists and Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate, whose rhetorics is everything else but ordinary and dull. It seems that a shy daughter of a Lutheran priest just kept on being herself and outsmarted everybody else. That is one of her other accomplishments as well.