SHE was an extremely clever girl and Wolf Donath, a retired teacher, reminisced admiringly about her talent for maths and Russian. His features clouded over, however, when asked if he would vote for his former pupil today in the election that is expected to result in her becoming the first woman to lead Germany.

“Nein,” he growled. “No politician can solve Germany’s problems. Not even Angela Merkel.”

Instead of swelling with pride at the spectacle of Merkel’s meteoric rise in the world of politics, her home town in the increasingly depressed former East Germany was all but shunning its most famous daughter.

The anti-Merkel movement in the east could cost her party dearly in today’s vote, forcing her into a “grand coalition” with her political foes, an outcome one commentator described as a “recipe for lethargy, bleakness and deadlock”.

Yet not even Merkel’s nearest and dearest seemed much interested in endorsing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Horst Kasner, her father, has long been one of its fiercest critics. Her brother, Marcus, a university professor, is a supporter of the Greens and Herlind, her mother, is an activist for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). Irene, her younger sister, is an occupational therapist not known for her warm opinion of the CDU.

“They are a divided family,” acknowledged Hans-Ulrich Beeskow, another of Merkel’s former teachers in Templin. “A bit like Germany as a whole.”

Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a unified Germany seemed paradoxically more fractured than ever and the indifference of Templin, a small town in the Brandenburg countryside, to the advance of a woman they are calling “the German Iron Lady” was a glaring symptom of the malaise.

If the place where she grew up could not embrace the 51-year-old former physicist, who is being compared to Baroness Thatcher, how could the rest of the country be expected to muster much enthusiasm for her cause?

Merkel’s grim sense of purpose might not inspire much fervour but she is expected nonetheless to make history and emerge as the first chancellor from the east, even if it is in an uncomfortable coalition.

The race was too close to call yesterday and both camps said they would pursue support among an estimated 10m undecided voters until the polling booths close this evening.

Merkel hoped her party and the smaller, liberal Free Democrats would garner enough votes for a majority, an outcome that would be applauded by several European governments from Warsaw to Whitehall. It would also be warmly welcomed by America since Merkel, unlike Schröder, does not promote Europe as a counterweight to American power.

At the same time it would mean weaker relations with France, a prospect that would be cheering to Tony Blair whose efforts at reforming the European Union have been hampered by the Franco-German axis of Schröder and the French president Jacques Chirac.

Just as much was at stake on the domestic stage, where Merkel would like to go faster than Schröder in overhauling an outdated social system and boosting the world’s third biggest economy, a traditional motor for European growth.

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