The choice of Angela Merkel as the first easterner to serve as chancellor marks a major milestone in Germany’s 15-year struggle to overcome the challenges of unifying the nation at the end of the Cold War.

But her victory has not been reflected in the fortunes of the struggling and dispirited east, which suffers in comparison to the prosperous west.

The gap is reflected in her personal story as well. In her autobiography, Merkel has recalled how her upbringing as a churchgoer in an officially atheist country strengthened her commitment to personal and economic freedom.

When it came to campaigning, however, the would-be chancellor was cautious about stressing her origins. When a questioner on a television show suggested she might talk more about her eastern roots, she demurred.

“I am of course an all-German politician,” said Merkel, 51, who has lived most of her life in the east.

There is one clear reason for not running as an Ossi, the slang term for easterner: Most of the votes are in the west. And many voters in the east remain enamoured of the Left Party, still universally known there as the Party of Democratic Socialism — the neo-communist successor to the ruling party in Soviet-occupied East Germany. The country ceased to exist when Germany reunified on October 3, 1990, as the Cold War came to an end.

If Merkel steered clear of the east as a campaign theme, easterners returned the favour by voting for Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats and the Left Party ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The Social Democrats got 30.5 percent of the vote in the east, while the Left Party got 25.4, edging the Christian Democrats at 25.3.

Merkel was a 35-year-old physics researcher at the East German Academy of Sciences when the wall came down.

She shared a difficult lot with many easterners. The fact that her father was a Protestant minister in Templin, north of Berlin, meant she had to do better than the other students to have a chance of going to college — and it meant she could forget about becoming a teacher, the path she once said she probably would have chosen.

Her career nonetheless took off when Germany unified, fuelled by luck and her keen sense of the moment. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to welcome easterners, and she not only won a Christian Democratic nomination for parliament but was named to Kohl’s cabinet as women’s minister in 1990 — all before the end of her first year in politics.

Not all easterners fared so well. Unemployment in the east remains at 17.6 percent, compared to 9.5 percent in the west. Many young people have left, and eastern towns have seen their populations shrink. A third of westerners have never bothered to visit the former east.

Amid the euphoria of reunification in 1990, Kohl promised “flowering landscapes” behind the former Iron Curtain, but that remained only a dream for many as the east’s outmoded industry collapsed.

Journalists tried to get Merkel to share a sense of triumph on Monday. She would not.

“I have a lot of work ahead of me,” she said.