German Chancellor Angela Merkel possible contender for Nobel Peace Prize

Angela Merkel, who has been chancellor of Germany since 2005 and currently serves her fourth term, is a contender for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

Her decision in 2015 to allow more than a million migrants into the country has earned her respect worldwide and increasing criticism at home.

The move was largely to blame for the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) in last year's election.

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More recently, she has been plagued by in-party fighting and her so called grand coalition government of her CDU, the CSU and the SPD was on the brink of collapse twice since its inauguration.

Only some ten days ago, Merkel admitted she had misjudged her response to allegations of far-right sympathies against Germany's spymaster, after resolving a row over his redeployment that threatened to pull her government apart.

BfV intelligence agency head Hans-Georg Maassen's political views came under the microscope this month after he questioned the authenticity of video footage showing radicals hounding migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz.

Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), their Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party and the third coalition partner - the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) - agreed last week to transfer Maassen to a senior role in the Interior Ministry.

But that prompted a public blacklash when it emerged that Maassen would also get a pay rise. The coalition rescinded the hike, after some members of the SPD called for their party to quit the alliance if it stayed in place.

Born Angela Kasner in Hamburg in 1954, she moved with her family to East Germany when she was only a toddler after her father, a Protestant pastor, was offered a job in the state of Brandenburg, north of Berlin. She grew up in the town of Templin, in the Uckermark region with its lakes and rolling hills.

Merkel studied physics at the University of Leipzig, earning a doctorate, and became politically active after the Berlin Wall fell, joining the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in 1990. Only a year later she became the youngest member of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet as minister for women and youth.

In 1994, she became German environment minister and in 2000 she was elected CDU leader after the party and Kohl were rocked by a scandal over illegal funding.

Merkel became Germany's first woman chancellor and the country's first leader to have grown up in the former communist East Germany in 2005, when her conservatives narrowly defeated Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD).