After a 29-year wait TIME magazine finally named a woman as Person of the Year: German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The divisive Merkel beat out a controversial list of people that included Donald Trump, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

TIME praised Merkel as a powerful leader who has held together the European Union in a year when it faced three major challenges: the Greek debt crisis, the refugee crisis and a new wave of terrorism. The article also details how Merkel's upbringing made her an unlikely candidate for the leadership role she has held for a decade.

"Europe’s most powerful leader is a refugee from a time and place where her power would have been unimaginable," begins the profile of Merkel. "The shy daughter of a Lutheran minister, Merkel slipped into politics as a divorced Protestant in a largely Catholic party, a woman in a frat house, an Ossi in the newly unified Germany of the 1990s where easterners were still aliens. No other major Western leader grew up in a stockade, which gave Merkel a rare perspective on the lure of freedom and the risks people will take to taste it."

TIME released a list of eight finalists earlier this week, and, like every year, the shortlist alone brought its share of backlash.

Read the full story on Angela Merkel, TIME’s 2015 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/9Bikxd6Bot https://t.co/cKavVurIoV — TIME.com (@TIME) December 9, 2015

Merkel has worked to redefine what it means to be German. In response to the refugee crisis, as other European nations closed their doors, Merkel announced in September that Germany would be welcoming refugees to resettle there.

The country now has 964,574 new asylum-seekers that have registered in the first 11 months of 2015, and the number is expected to surpass 1 million by the end of the year.

Merkel is the first woman to receive the Person of the Year award as as individual since Corazon Aquino, the first woman president of the Philippines, graced the cover in 1986.

Since that time, women have appeared as part of larger groups receiving the honor but not as the sole recipient, until now.