BERLIN, October 28 (RIA Novosti) - Germany's lower house of parliament on Wednesday formally reelected Chancellor Angela Merkel, the head the Christian Democratic Union, for a second term.
Of 612 lawmakers present, 323 voted for Merkel, passing the required majority of 312 votes.
Her center-right coalition government, including the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the pro-business Free Democratic Party, will be sworn in later in the day.
The three parties will have a comfortable majority of 332 seats in the 622-seat lower house of parliament. The new government replaces the grand coalition between the CDU and the center-left Social Democrats, which won just 23% of the vote in the September 27 parliamentary election.
Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 into the family of a Lutheran pastor in the German second-largest city of Hamburg. She graduated high school in East Germany and enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where she joined Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), or Free German Youth, the official socialist youth movement.
She received a doctorate from the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences, but turned to politics in 1989, the year when the Berlin Wall, becoming a press secretary of the new pre-unification government under Lothar de Maiziere.
In 1990, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag from the Christian Democratic Union, Germany's largest conservative political party, and later became minister for women and youth in Helmut Kohl's third cabinet. In 1994, she was made minister for the environment and reactor safety.
In 1998, Merkel became secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union, and in 2000 she was elected its chairman.
In 2005, Merkel's CDU/CSU coalition won 35,2% of the vote in September 18 early elections, one percentage point more than the Social Democratic Party, led by then-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. On November 22, Merkel, at the age of 51, became Germany's first female chancellor and the youngest chancellor in the country's history.
