Bundeskanzler

Bundeskanzler or Bundeskanzlerin (German for "Federal Chancellor") may refer to:

Chancellor of Germany

The Chancellor of Germany is the head of government of Germany. The official title in German is Bundeskanzler(-in) (literally, Federal Chancellor), sometimes shortened to Kanzler(-in). The term, dating from the early Middle Ages, is derived from the Latin term cancellarius.

In German politics the Chancellor is equivalent to that of a prime minister in many other countries. German has two equivalent translations of prime minister, Premierminister and Ministerpräsident. While Premierminister usually refers to heads of governments of foreign countries (e.g., Great Britain), Ministerpräsident may also refer to the heads of government of most German states.

The current Chancellor is Angela Merkel, who is serving her third term in office. She is the first female chancellor, thus being known in German as Bundeskanzlerin. That particular word was never used officially before Merkel, but it is a grammatically regular formation of a noun denoting a female chancellor.

The modern office of Chancellor evolved from the position created for Otto von Bismarck in the North German Confederation in 1867; the Confederation evolved into a German nation-state with the 1871 Unification of Germany. The role of the Chancellor has varied greatly throughout Germany's modern history. Today, the Chancellor is widely considered to be the country's effective leader.

Chancellor of Germany (1949–)

The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (in German called Bundeskanzler(in), literally "Federal Chancellor", or Kanzler for short) is, under the German 1949 constitution, the head of government of Germany. It is historically a continuation of the office of Chancellor (German: Kanzler, later Reichskanzler, Chancellor of the Realm) that was originally established as the office of Chancellor of the North German Confederation in 1867. The 1949 constitution increased the role of the Chancellor compared to the 1919 Weimar Constitution by making the Chancellor much more independent of the influence of the Federal President and granting the Chancellor the right to set the guidelines for all policy areas, thus making him the real chief executive. The role is generally comparable to that of Prime Minister in other parliamentary democracies.

There have been eight chancellors since 1949. The current Chancellor of Germany is Angela Merkel, who was elected in 2005. She is the first female Chancellor since the establishment of the original office in 1867, and known in German as Bundeskanzlerin, the feminine form of Bundeskanzler. Merkel is also the first Chancellor elected since the fall of the Berlin Wall to have been raised in the former East Germany.

Angela Merkel

Angela Dorothea Merkel (née Kasner; born 17 July 1954) is a German politician and former research scientist who has been the Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and the Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000.

Having earned a doctorate as a physical chemist, Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, briefly serving as a deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected East German Government in 1990. Following German reunification in 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag for Stralsund-Nordvorpommern-Rügen in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a seat she has held ever since. She was later appointed as the Minister for Women and Youth in 1991 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, later becoming the Minister for the Environment in 1994. After Kohl was defeated in 1998, she was elected Secretary-General of the CDU before becoming the party's first female leader two years later in the aftermath of a donations scandal that toppled Wolfgang Schäuble.

Willy Brandt

Willy Brandt (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪli ˈbʁant]; born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992) was a German statesman and politician, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1964 to 1987 and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts to strengthen cooperation in western Europe through the EEC and to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe. He was the first Social Democrat chancellor since 1930.

Fleeing to Norway and then Sweden during the Nazi regime and working as a leftist journalist, he took the name Willy Brandt as a pseudonym to avoid detection by Nazi agents, and then formally adopted the name in 1948. Brandt was originally considered one of the leaders of the right wing of the SPD, and earned initial fame as Governing Mayor of West Berlin. He served as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's cabinet, and became chancellor in 1969. As chancellor, he maintained West Germany's close alignment with the United States and focused on strengthening European integration in western Europe, while launching the new policy of Ostpolitik aimed at improving relations with Eastern Europe. Brandt was controversial on both the right wing, for his Ostpolitik, and on the left wing, for his support of American policies, including the Vietnam War, and right-wing authoritarian regimes. The Brandt Report became a recognised measure for describing the general North-South divide in world economics and politics between an affluent North and a poor South. Brandt was also known for his fierce anti-communist policies at the domestic level, culminating in the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) in 1972.