Angela Merkel named Time’s Person of the Year

She also topped the Forbes “World’s Most Powerful Women” list for the fifth year in a row, pipping Hilary Clinton, Taylor Swift and Oprah Winfrey to the top position.

Gibbs said Merkel won in 2015 because “in a year where world leaders were tested all through the year, no one was tested like she was”.

Mrs Merkel, 61, is just the fourth woman since 1927 to be chosen and the first since opposition leader Corazon C Aquino of the Philippines in 1986.

The idea of the selection is that it is a person who has – for better or for worse – been highly influential over the events of the year.

Merkel entered politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, first rising to the position of chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union party.

More recently, Merkel’s management of the epic migrant crisis that has swept her continent has lead people to call her “Europe’s conscience”. Her style of governance was described by Time as “resolutely dull”. This, of course, is excluding 2002’s “The Whistleblowers“, 2005’s “The Good Samaritans“, 2006’s “You“, 2011’s “The Protester” and 2014’s “Ebola Fighters”, which all were represented on the cover of the magazine by at least one woman. “Not global warming, not the Iran deal, it’s Trump and what it means to US leadership in the world”.

At the time the victor was announced on NBC, Baghdadi was the runaway victor in that online survey with some 64% of the vote. “She arguably could have been the person of the year a number of times”.

In late August, when tens of thousands of migrants fleeing war in the Middle East streamed into Hungary, threatening a humanitarian crisis, Merkel agreed to suspend the European Union’s asylum rules and allow them to continue into Germany.

The designation comes as Trump has created a firestorm for his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States – a suggestion that Republicans and Democrats denounced but Trump has embraced as “common sense”.

During the “Today Show” presentation, Gibbs ranked Baghdadi as the second contender, followed by Trump, Black Lives Matter activists and Rouhani.