Parliament on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, confirmed her as German Chancellor for a third historic tenure.

Angela Merkel, 59, was yesterday, December 17, 2013, elected as German Chancellor for a third term at the head of a grand coalition following a vote in the Lower House of Parliament, the BBC reported. The new government is expected to be sworn in soon.

Reports said the vote in the Bundestag was a formality as the ruling parties hold an overwhelming majority of the seats. A total of 462 politicians backed Merkel for Chancellor, 150 voted against her, while nine abstained, the RTE News website said. Merkel now joins fellow conservatives, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl as the only post-World War II Chancellors to have won three terms. 

The Chancellor’s centre-right Christian Democrats, CDU and the Christian Social Union, CSU bloc fell short of an overall majority in last September's polls and will share power with the Social Democrats, SDP. The new government will be slightly to the left of the previous one in which the Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union were in coalition with the market-oriented Free Democrats, FDP.

Born in Hamburg in 1954, Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in Physics in 1978, but later worked as a chemist at a scientific academy in East Berlin. She was never involved in politics, but at the age of 36, she joined the democracy movement in 1989. After the Berlin Wall came down, she got a job as government spokeswoman following the first democratic elections. She joined the CDU party in 1990 and was to become its leader in 2000. She was first elected Chancellor in 2005 and re-elected in 2009.