Smash hit

The question is, will Germany let her? After enjoying extraordinary growth and stability in the 1970s and 1980s, Germany and its social model have been put under increasing pressure in a globalised world. According to opinion polls, the number of Germans feeling pessimistic about the future has never been higher since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nowhere is the sense of despair greater than in the east and in places such as Templin, whose 30% unemployment rate is the worst in the land. Such woes make some inhabitants sound nostalgic for the days of the hammer and sickle.

“At least everybody had a job back then,” said Bernd Silberbach, a shopkeeper. “I know people who struggle to work when they are ill because they are afraid of being sacked.”

Merkel was three months old when her father, a Lutheran pastor, moved the family from the West German city of Hamburg into the heart of communist East Germany.

She has spoken little about her childhood but Merkel certainly grew up in an unusual milieu. The family home was a church-run complex offering accommodation and therapy for the mentally handicapped.

Merkel’s father taught at a seminary whose director, Jobst Reifenstein, is a friend of the family who is polite enough not to admit that he is voting against “Angie”, as they call her on campaign posters.

“It will be positive for this region if she is made chancellor,” he said. “We’d certainly get a lot more tourists.”

If people in the east were disillusioned with the governing party, however, they were more likely to vent their frustration by voting for the newly formed Left party of former communists and SPD defectors.

At the outset it had looked as though Merkel would win a landslide. But the big lead enjoyed by the CDU has narrowed after a series of gaffes and miscalculations. This weekend there was a statistical dead heat between political blocs.

Edmund Stoiber, the conservative Bavarian prime minister and Merkel ally, claimed that east German voters were not intelligent enough to decide the country’s future. A Christian Democrat state minister who seemed to suggest, after a particularly ghoulish child murder, that killing babies was typical eastern behaviour, completed the sabotage of the campaign in that part of the country.

Merkel also stumbled over the controversy surrounding her choice of Paul Kirchhof, an economics professor and champion of a flat rate of income tax, to take charge of financial policy. Schröder, a veteran campaigner with a gift for exploiting his enemies’ weak points, seized on this as a sign that she favoured the rich. Merkel was forced to distance herself from her guru but the damage was already done.

Another problem for the campaign, however, was Merkel herself. Despite the orange posters and the theme song Angie from the Rolling Stones, there was not much rock’n’roll in the Merkel camp. Its flag-bearer was mocked as a frumpish former academic unable to connect with ordinary people.

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