AN INCREASINGLY confident Angela Merkel signalled to Washington yesterday that she will do her utmost to soothe the troubled transatlantic relationship if she wins power on Sunday.

As she tours Germany trying to drum up last-minute support for the Christian Democrats, Frau Merkel is appealing to those Germans who want to make their peace with the United States, after the controversy over the Iraq war. Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, won a narrow victory in 2002 with his anti-American stance.

Frau Merkel called yesterday for solidarity with the US hurricane victims, saying: “Many will remember how the Americans supported us after the Second World War.”

They were strange words for a woman who spent the first 35 of her 51 years living and working in the East German communist state. But Frau Merkel has reinvented herself as a West German, blocking out her years as an enthusiastic member of the Communist Free German Youth.

The conciliatory message went down well in Osnabrück, as it has done in other big end-of-campaign pitstops in western Germany. The cathedral city was bombed 72 times in the Second World War by British and US aircraft, but there is little bitterness in the town, which became a British garrison after the war.

Frau Merkel thus adapted her standard campaign trail speech for Osnabrück, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648 to end decades of war. At the rally zealous young teenagers held up orange “Angie” flash cards as if they were American cheerleaders. Other enthusiasts unfolded a banner from the town hall announcing “habemus Angelam” — a play on the words used to announce a new pope.

Frau Merkel was visibly annoyed by the banner. She is, after all, a Protestant divorcée and, as her election blunders have shown, far from infallible. Nevertheless, she has got into a confident election stride, seeking to enliven her speech with populist sideswipes. In Osnabrück she promised to tackle the question of over- generous pensions for politicians, drawing ripples of applause.

As election day approaches Frau Merkel’s lead of about 6 or 7 per cent is stable. Herr Schröder is in the view of most political analysts a beaten man. Only the terms of the Merkel victory have to be settled.

The Chancellor, meanwhile, is trawling the country as thoroughly as his rival. He has put in more than 100 appearances on the stump and still draws big audiences.

Herr Schröder argues that he will keep Germany out of trouble, while Frau Merkel’s view is more ambiguous. She is against the deployment of German troops in Iraq, but in favour of a warmer relationship with Washington. Frau Merkel’s message is more subtle and therefore, in conventional political wisdom, a political vote-loser. But the public mood is for subtlety: Germans seem to want a less bullish foreign policy.

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