Superfrau trades on 'ordinary' image

FINSTERWALDE - The election rally has been warmed up American style, and the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up blares from the loudspeakers as the star guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, takes to the stage in a tailored dress coat, black slacks and expensive-looking coiffure.

It's all engineered glitz, but that's not what wows the crowd. What they like in Merkel is her ordinariness.

Germany's leader has taken common sense, modesty and bland rhetoric and transformed them into an elixir of political success.

"Thank you very much for coming out on this beautiful day," Merkel tells Finsterwalde, a small town in eastern Germany halfway between Berlin and Dresden. "Thank you for not choosing to spend the afternoon in your garden."

An east German singer, Petra Ziegert, serenades the Chancellor with a song about Superfrau (Superwoman), and the crowd cheer their support.

That scene yesterday says much about the state of eastern Germany today and the improbable rise of Merkel herself.

Once a hub for electronics and furniture manufacturing in the old German Democratic Republic, Finsterwalde is now an image of well-heeled desolation, its economic life ravaged by the downfall of the communist system nearly 20 years ago.

The place has the feel of a ghost town where appearances are still kept up. Thanks to Government subsidies, the streets are beautifully paved but strangely empty, for the population has slumped by a quarter - to 18,000 - since German reunification.

In the market square, apartment buildings elegantly restored by investors from the West have been unoccupied for years.

Around a fifth of the working population is jobless, and many of the others have taken early retirement. Finsterwalde is a town of grey heads. "All our children have left," says a man in his 70s.

Merkel, though, has come with a message that dwells neither on Finsterwalde's pain nor on the failures of reunification - one which says simply that, in her sensible hands, good times lie ahead.

She pitches on her deft stewardship of the economy at times of crisis, her refusal to panic and "bail out the banks, when it was protecting people's savings that needed to be done".

The closest she gets to egomania is to quietly place herself in the same lineage as the postwar greats of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

"The best times have always occurred under the CDU," she says, referring to Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Kresinger, Helmut Kohl and, by extension, Angela Merkel.

Before heading to the next stop on her electoral tour, the Chancellor finds time to praise the local delicacy, Brandenburg roast goose ("I always eat it at Christmas") and to boost the ill-starred football team Energie Cottbus ("We really have to get it back into the top division").

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye, but the crowd doesn't care. They are ecstatic as the Chancellor waves.

"The Merkel presence will give us the push we need to win this seat," says a local CDU campaigner, Knut Abraham.

Once written off as grey, frumpy and uninspiring, the daughter of an East German pastor has emerged as Europe's most popular politician today. Her support is especially strong in eastern Germany. For many "Ossis", or former East Germans, her rise amounts to a spiritual revenge over the "Wessis", the West Germans who cast aside almost everything in the East - the currency, the political institutions, the laws - after reunification.

"She's a woman, she's from the east, she's one of us," said Birgit Schwann, a woman in her 50s who had come to attend the rally with her ageing parents. Schwann's two children, like many others, have left home and gone to live in western Germany.

Nationwide, though, no clear picture emerges about Merkel's bid for a second term as Chancellor.

Her conservative Christian Union - an alliance of the CDU with a Bavarian sister party, the Christian Socialists - seems destined to emerge the largest single bloc in next Monday's vote for the Bundestag.

In the past four years, Merkel has been locked in a partnership with her rivals, the Social Democrats.

It has been an exceptional but increasingly fractious arrangement that has helped to address some of Germany's big economic reforms - yet left many untackled.

On the campaign trail, Merkel is giving no clear hint on how she will deal with the elements of the economic crisis that have still to emerge.

In fact, on the campaign trail she speaks little about what she has achieved in coalition so far in her four years as Chancellor.

Four years of sharing power with the centre-left Social Democrats has robbed the electorate of traditional left-right arguments on doctrine.

But then, that seems to sum up the electorate that for the moment prefers calm to experiments, fake promises and jazzy politicians.

Until last week, Merkel seemed likely to be able to team up with a small kingmaking party, the Free Democrats, which are fiercely pro-business and are far more in line with her conservative instinct.

But new surveys suggest the Social Democrats are making a late run, enabling them to notch up at least a quarter of the vote, while the CDU is stagnating.

If so, say some analysts, the Greens could be coaxed into a coalition fold alongside the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats, consigning the CDU to the opposition ranks.

Or there may be a temptation to return to the "grand coalition" of right and left - which in effect is asking an estranged couple to climb back into bed together after they have had a row and courted other partners.

Merkel may well have to dip into her "superwoman" reserves of calm and patience once more.

PARTNERSHIP POLITICS

Who's going to win the German general election on September 27?

Right now, it looks as if Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats will secure the biggest share of the vote. In the run-up, they have been polling 36 per cent, mainly because Merkel is one of Germany's most popular leaders since the war.

But that means she'll have to find a coalition partner, won't she?

Yes, and this is where the outcome is almost impossible to predict. Merkel wants to end her present grand coalition with the left-wing Social Democrats and form a new government with the pro-business Free Democrats. Some polls predict that the liberals and conservatives will squeak enough votes to form such an alliance; others that they will just fail.

What would a conservative coalition mean for Germany?

It would result in key policy changes including lower taxes and a long-term delay in Germany's plan to phase out all nuclear power stations by 2020. It would also enable Merkel to introduce a programme of structural and economic reform she abandoned when she was obliged to join with the Social Democrats after the 2005 poll.

What will happen if Merkel hasn't the votes for a new alliance?

In that case, she will be forced to continue her existing arrangement with the Social Democrats. That's likely to mean a continuation of compromise politics with both parties agreeing on the lowest common policy denominator to govern.

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