TIME magazine Wednesday named German Chancellor Angela Merkel as its “Person of the Year 2015,” hailing her leadership for navigating debt and refugee crises that threatened to tear the European Union (EU) apart.

    “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,” wrote editor Nancy Gibbs.

    Time described her as the de facto leader of the EU who this year steered the zone through two existential crises — Greek bankruptcy and the migrant crisis.

    Throughout the eurozone crisis, when a battered continent looked to Berlin, Merkel preached fiscal discipline and kept a tight grip on the nation’s purse strings, soothing the angst of a thrifty populace.

    But it was this summer that the usually cautious leader took the biggest gamble of her decade in power by throwing open Germany’s doors to asylum seekers — owning an issue set to define her legacy.

    One million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December as conflicts rage in Syria, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

    On Wednesday, Merkel’s spokesperson Steffen Seibert, warmly welcomed the accolade, announced by Time on American breakfast television.

    “I am sure that the chancellor will see it as an encouragement to press on with her political work for the good of Germany as well as Europe,” he said.

    A Lutheran pastor’s daughter who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, the 61-year-old Merkel is the world’s most powerful woman, first elected chancellor in 2005 by Europe’s biggest economy.

    Born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in Hamburg, West Germany, Merkel is the daughter of Horst Kasner, a native of Berlin, and Herlind Kasner, a teacher of English and Latin.

    Merkel’s mother was the daughter of the Danzig politician Willi Jentzsch and maternal granddaughter of the city clerk of Elbing, Emil Drange.

    Religion played a key role in Angela Merkel’s migration to East Germany. Her father was born a Catholic, but the Kasner family eventually converted to Lutheranism, and he studied Lutheran theology in Heidelberg and afterward in Hamburg.

    In 1954, Angela’s father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow, which was then in East Germany, and so the family moved to Templin. Merkel thus grew up in the countryside 80 km north of East Berlin.

    A star student at school, she excelled in Russian, which she has put to use in defusing the Ukraine conflict with President Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB officer in East Germany when the Wall fell in 1989.

    Merkel was educated in Templin and at the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978.

    While a student, she participated in the reconstruction of the ruin of the Moritzbastei, a project students initiated to create their own club and recreation facility on campus. Such an initiative was unprecedented in East Germany in that period and was initially resisted by the university; however, with backing from the local leadership of the party, the project was allowed to proceed.

    Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. After being awarded a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry, she worked as a researcher and published several papers.

    In 1989, Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party Democratic Awakening.

    Merkel stood for election at the 1990 federal election, the first since reunification, and was elected to the Bundestag for the constituency of Stralsund Rugen, which is in the district of Vorpommern-Rugen. She has won re-election for this constituency at the six federal elections since.

    After her first election, she was almost immediately appointed to the Cabinet, serving as minister for women and youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

    In 1994, she was promoted to minister for the environment and nuclear safety, which gave her greater political visibility and a platform from which to build her political career. As one of Kohl’s protégées and his youngest Cabinet minister, she was frequently referred to by Kohl “my girl.”

    After the Kohl government was defeated at the 1998 election, Merkel was appointed secretary-general of the CDU, a key position since the party was no longer part of the federal government.

    Merkel oversaw a string of CDU election victories in six out of seven state elections in 1999, breaking the long-standing SPD-Green hold on the Bundesrat.

    Following a party funding scandal that compromised many leading figures of the CDU, including Kohl himself and his successor as CDU leader Wolfgang Schauble, Merkel criticized her former mentor publicly and advocated a fresh start for the party without him.

    She was subsequently elected to replace Schauble, becoming the first female leader of a German party in April 2000.

    Merkel assumed the office of Chancellor of Germany in November 2005 following a stalemate election that resulted in a grand coalition with the SPD.

    She has been praised by refugees as “Mama Merkel” and derided as the eurozone’s “austerity priestess,” but her stunning ascent from East Germany defies political convention.

    “Each time Merkel stepped in. Germany would bail Greece out, on her strict terms. It would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it,” Gibbs wrote Wednesday.

    “And it would deploy troops abroad in the fight against ISIS. 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.”

    Seemingly indifferent to the trappings of power and lacking vanity, Merkel lives in a Berlin flat with her rarely seen scientist husband, Joachim Sauer.

    She married physics student Ulrich Merkel in 1977 and took his surname. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. Her second and current husband is a quantum chemist and professor. They first met in 1981 and married privately in 1998. She has no children, but Sauer has two adult sons from a previous marriage.

    She shops in a neighborhood supermarket and spends holidays hiking in the Alps.

    Her oratory is often monotonous and she is awkward in front of the cameras, but it is this air of ordinariness that has made Merkel a hit with German voters, who value no-nonsense pragmatism and competence.

    She is a fervent soccer fan and has been known to listen to games while in the Bundestag and to attend games of the national team in her official capacity.(SD-Agencies)