Across the country, in loud, sweaty beer tents and on scrappy, weed-tangled urban parkland, German politicians are scrambling for the Absent Voter. With four days to go before the general election, about 26 per cent of Germans are unsure how to cast their vote. So the parties have instructed their candidates to go out and shout their wares, like fishmongers at the end of market day.

But what about the Absent Leader? The Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who spent the beginning of the election campaign hiking in the South Tyrol, will be in Pittsburgh for the G20 meeting during its final days. So far the figures show that she is right to be confident. Barring some extraordinary reconfiguration of the Left, she will still be Chancellor of Germany this time next week. Two polls give her Christian Democrats 36 per cent of the vote, a 10 point lead over the Social Democrats. The open question is whether she will win a sufficient majority to head a pro-business coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (currently polling 12 per cent) or whether she will be forced back into harness with Frank Walter Steinmeier’s Social Democrats. Either way she does not have to change her telephone number.

After four years in power, Ms Merkel’s rhetorical skills are as poor as they ever were and yet she is as popular now as was Helmut Kohl, the hero of German unification, at his very peak. Popular, but strangely invisible. Arriving in Mainz for her last election pitstop before travelling to the United States, she made less impact on the locals than a game of boules in the park.

“Can you save a seat for me?” a flustered middle-aged woman on the 13th-century market square said. “I’ve got to buy stuff for dinner before the shops shut.”

By the time she returned — carrots, potatoes, some chicken livers and a bottle of red — Ms Merkel had been and gone. What had she missed in those 40 minutes at the supermarket?

For a moment the square had filled with Christian Democrat students, squeakily enthusiastic as if they had inhaled helium gas, hoisting up orange “Angie” placards. Then the warm-up man had introduced the “present and future Chancellor of Germany”. The trouser-suited Ms Merkel promptly rattled through the reasons why the country should embrace the centre Right. The only significant difference from her other on-the-stump speeches was a sturdy attack on imposing higher taxes on the rich. “It won’t create any new jobs here if companies are scared off and move to Austria or Switzerland,” she said.

The Christian Democrat faithful duly nodded. Unemployment, or rather the fear of a new rapid surge of job losses, is the critical backdrop to Sunday’s election. More than a million workers are being kept, expensively, off the dole by a system of short-term working. Many companies want to lay off these workers to make their companies fit for the recovery but are hanging on until after the election before announcing redundancies.

A Merkel government with the Free Democrats might well lead to an acceleration in the jobless rate; some predictions reckon that it will leap to five million from 3.5 million in eight or nine months. The alternative Merkel government, with the Social Democrats, would at least have the labour movement on its side.

It is the issue, and it is not the issue: in modern Germany mass unemployment tends to depoliticise rather than radicalise. It makes people stay home and sulk. “We want Angie,” says Klaus, 50, a television executive based in Mainz. “But I don’t think the country needs a neoliberal revolution at the moment.” His wife, Uta, a teacher, agrees. “This vote is not like the Obama one. We have had our change over the past decade — Germany has become more open but also tougher, less comfortable with itself. Now we need someone who can competently manage the change we have already gone through.”

“Another grand coalition?” The Times asks. “Shush,” says Uta. “Don’t speak the word.”

A Merkel government with the Free Democrats would bring lower taxes, a rehabilitation of nuclear power, less focus on the State, more on the individual. It would be fraught — the Free Democrats do not like the way citizens’ rights are being scratched away by anti-terror legislation — but would probably survive the full term. A grand coalition would be relatively easy — but would probably crumble after two years.

“You have to remember that Merkel is a power person,” Gerd Langguth, her biographer, says. “An alliance with the Free Democrats will probably keep her in power longer than any other combination.”

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president