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Called “Chancellor of the Free World” on the magazine’s cover, Merkel is noted in the Time article for her how she responded to “Vladimir Putin’s creeping theft of Ukraine” and her attention to how “the prospect of Greek bankruptcy threatened the very existence of the euro zone.”
"Europe’s most powerful leader is a refugee from a time and place where her power would have been unimaginable," says the Time article. Merkel, 61, grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin, "the shy daughter of a Lutheran minister" and entered politics in the 1990s in the newly united Germany.
"No other major Western leader grew up in a stockade, which gave Merkel a rare perspective on the lure of freedom and the risks people will take to taste it," the article says.
"Not once or twice but three times there has been reason to wonder this year whether Europe could continue to exist, not culturally or geographically but as a historic experiment in ambitious statecraft," Time editor Nancy Gibbs wrote.
"You can agree with her or not, but she is not taking the easy road. 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."
The other 2015 finalists included Donald Trump, Caitlyn Jenner, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the Black Lives Matter protest movement, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
See the Time Person of the Year 2015 report here.
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