THE chancellor’s helicopter swoops in over Kühlungsborn, a Wilhelmine resort on Germany’s Baltic coast. In the beach-front Concert Garden her face, in soft focus, beams down from posters promising “a Germany where we live well and gladly”. A local Christian Democrat (CDU) candidate welcomes the chancellor to the stage, exclaiming: “They used to call this holiday weather! Now they call it Angela Merkel weather.”

“Holidays”, Mrs Merkel tells the crowd, “give us the opportunity to think things over.” It is a competitive world out there, she reports: the average age in Germany is 45; in Niger and Mali it is 15. But her prescriptions are undemanding. Almost every sentence has something for the right and something for the left. Prosperity must be earned and fairly distributed. The state must not boss people around and it must support them. Refugees must integrate. Diversity is strength. The chancellor rocks gently from right to left and back as she speaks, a political hammock cradling her audience in the afternoon warmth.

Mrs Merkel has been chancellor since 2005. Her centre-right CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), governed first in coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), then with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), then with the SPD again (see timeline). The CDU is heading for another comfortable victory at the Bundestag election on September 24th (see article), after which she will lead another coalition, perhaps with the SPD, perhaps with the FDP, the Greens or both.

Her years in office have made her a familiar figure to Germans and to the world. But she remains a conundrum—as inscrutable, says Der Spiegel, a magazine, as “sphinxes, divas and queens”. In a quintessentially cryptic aside the chancellor, who rarely talks about herself or her overall record, once told an audience: “Merkel is Merkel, with all the risks and side-effects.” But which Merkel? Which side-effects?

The chancellor does not work at the grand desk in her cavernous Berlin office, preferring the corner of a meeting table. The room boasts portraits of Konrad Adenauer—West Germany’s first post-war leader, whose 14 years as chancellor Mrs Merkel looks likely to surpass come 2019—and Catherine the Great. There is a silver cross and a cluster of giant chess pieces. When visitors call, she shows them the trace of the now-vanished Berlin Wall from the window. At night she returns to her modest flat, where she listens to Wagner and cooks potato soup.

Her Lutheran faith (“an inner compass”, she calls it) expresses itself in her unflashy style and her instincts: debt is bad; helping the needy, good. She thinks ethically, not ideologically. “I’m a bit liberal, a bit Christian-social, a bit conservative,” she said in 2009. For Konstantin Richter, whose novel “The Chancellor” imagines her inner life, her distrust of ideology is rooted in her experience of East Germany: “She witnessed ideology collapse and believers turn into non-believers overnight.”

She is reactive rather than programmatic, managing events as they arise rather than hatching long-term plans. “She works like a scientist: she reads lots, assesses the facts and doesn’t have preconceptions,” observes Jens Spahn, her CDU colleague and deputy finance minister. She monitors events and mood-shifts in a constant exchange of text messages with aides, officials and MPs. In her campaigning Mrs Merkel invites voters to endorse her temperament, not specific proposals. Her message: I will handle such dramas as cross my desk calmly, rationally and without anything so distracting as a project.

A third crucial aspect to her character is detachment. She keeps her options open and strives never to rile or polarise. Her sentences are paper-chains of subclauses and qualifications. East Germany’s paranoid and hyper-surveilled society and Helmut Kohl’s patriarchal CDU taught her the virtues of ambiguity and patience. At a recent rally in the northern city of Bremen protesters heckled, kazooed and klaxoned the chancellor. Barely audible, she ploughed on unruffled: “Some have decided to spend the next four years yelling,” she ad-libbed with a shrug and a smile. She employs similar putdowns—calm but gently mocking—at international summits.

Ethical not ideological, reactive not programmatic and detached not engaged, Merkelism is the absence of political anchors. That suits modern Germany’s political culture well. Comfortable circumstances suppress the appetite for change. Its hard-won economic success buoyed for the time being by a weak euro, low interest rates, an oil glut and the liberalising labour-market reforms of her SPD predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, the country wants an administrator, not a reformer.

Angela momentum

Yet it is hardly a country with no need for reform. The lowest-paid 40% of German workers are earning less in real terms than 20 years ago. Food-bank use is up. The rate of investment has been dropping since 2012. Bridges creak and potholed roads challenge even the best-engineered suspensions. Not that Germany’s automotive excellence is what it once was: the image of the economically crucial car industry has been tainted, as has the country’s air, by emissions from the diesel engines it favours—a scandal it tried to cover up. Dirty coal is filling some of the gap left by the closure of the country’s nuclear plants as part of an “energy transformation”; the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions are up.

Mrs Merkel bears a good bit of the blame for all this. Closing the nuclear plants was her idea. The car industry has had an over-cosy relationship with the parties of her “grand coalition”. After her 12 years as chancellor the tax system remains strikingly unprogressive and state governments’ ability to invest in infrastructure or anything else is limited by an excessively rigid “debt brake”. Red tape frustrates builders and entrepreneurs; on average it takes 4.5 days to start a business in Britain but 10.5 in Germany. Last time the economy saw serious reforms there was no such thing as Facebook, let alone Uber.

The current election campaign was a chance to take on what Christian Lindner, the FDP’s leader, calls the “prosperity hallucination”: that in a changing world more of the same is good enough. Instead Mrs Merkel offers balanced banalities. Her critics call this “asymmetric demobilisation”: the purposeful pursuit of maximum inoffensiveness as a means of lowering turnout for her opponents.

To Mrs Merkel’s acolytes her blandness shows a refreshing distaste for yah-boo politics from a leader who refuses to pander to her base. When the local CDU attacked Hamburg’s SPD mayor over the riots that marred the G20 summit there in July, for example, Mrs Merkel stepped in to defend him. This blend of centrist policies and non-partisan behaviour explains why her appeal stretches well beyond the CDU’s typically older, more right-wing electorate. Younger and Green-leaning voters like her liberal refugee policies, SPD voters like her support for the minimum wage, FDP voters like her stability. Germany is a very centrist country (see chart); Mrs Merkel suffices it. When she chooses to, she can move quickly. Witness that closure of the nuclear plants, or her support for three Greek bail-outs. Witness her decision to welcome more than 1m refugees and other asylum-seekers in the summer of 2015. The first of these spooked business, the second upset many of the CDU’s conservative supporters. The third, though, now often seen as the most controversial, was at the time widely applauded. As the refugee crisis of 2015 built up, Mrs Merkel dithered: it was the year that “merkeln”, meaning to put off big decisions by doing and saying little, was added to the country’s vocabulary. By the end of August thousands of refugees were squeezing on to westbound trains in Hungary and trudging along Austrian motorways towards Munich. The chancellor found herself left with a blunt choice between letting them in and seeing ugly images of German border guards forcibly repelling men, women and children. She and the public knew which option they preferred. Closing the borders would have “upset a large majority of citizens”, according to Robin Alexander, a journalist for Die Welt who has written a book on that time. Crowds cheered the arrivals at Munich’s station. Mrs Merkel’s decision mixed a concern for public opinion, demographic considerations (an ageing society needs immigrants) and deep conviction (growing up behind the Berlin Wall taught her the evil of sealed borders) into a characteristic blend of flannel and political nous, conflict-aversion and moral rectitude. But it stretched Mr Spahn’s assertion that “the chancellor only prefers to take risks when she is confident she can control them.” The influx alienated the conservative CSU and fuelled the rise of the right-wing, populist Alternative for Germany party. As the number of refugees rose the chancellor’s popularity tumbled; the international press pushed out premature political obituaries. But she recovered her standing as the rate of new arrivals fell, thanks partly to a murky deal with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, which traded money and visas for refugee repatriation. “There can and shall not be another year like 2015,” she told a cheering CSU rally on August 25th.

In so far as Mrs Merkel’s reaction to the refugee crisis was a departure from her usual timid style, it points to a curious contrast between her domestic and international outlook. At home she does little to shore up the economy against the pressures of tomorrow; looking abroad she worries deeply about the future of the multilateral global order which has made today’s prosperous Germany possible.

Among her favourite books are one that describes the rise of 19th-century globalisation (Jürgen Osterhammel’s “The Transformation of the World”) and one that narrates its collapse in 1914 (Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers”). Mrs Merkel’s commitment to protecting rules-based globalisation is evident in her close involvement in climate talks, which began at a 1995 summit in Germany when she was the CDU’s environment minister. It was also present in her successful diplomatic push for European sanctions on Russia.

The chancellor’s detached demeanour serves her well in negotiations. She turns up at international summits well informed; she keeps her cool. The logo for the G20 summit hosted in Hamburg was a reef knot—a fastening the purpose of which is to pull together a loose bundle, and which gets tighter the more its loose ends are pulled. At the summit she worked closely with countries similarly fearful for the global order, most notably China, which joined Germany in sidelining America to reaffirm the importance of climate action.

When the Pew Research Centre asked people in 37 countries about various world leaders this spring, Mrs Merkel was the only one in whom more people expressed confidence than a lack of confidence. With America incoherent, Britain in isolationist retreat and France led by a new and untested president, some describe Mrs Merkel as the West’s new de facto leader. But that demands too much of her. Germany has a strong economy and a capable chancellor. But it remains reliant on America for its defence, however much Mrs Merkel rolls her eyes at Donald Trump. As Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy, puts it, Mrs Merkel “understands that she will have to manage a leaderless environment, but she is not prepared to become the leader of the free world”.

Indeed, Mrs Merkel frets about whether a European country “with few natural resources and an ageing population”, as one of her aides puts it, can stay relevant at all. She worries about the absence of European technology champions. Germany and Europe are becoming smaller and relatively poorer in the world, she observes, telling an audience in Berlin on August 23rd that some 80m Germans are not “per se” important to the Chinese or Indians.

International woman of mystery

So German foreign policy plays out as a conflict between rising international demands and the chancellor’s essential traits: her distrust of ideology, her reactiveness and her detachment. Throughout the euro-zone crisis, for example, Germany dragged its feet on proposals to help southern Europe’s struggling economies, but made concessions at the last possible moment rather than allow Greece to fall out of the system—as her CDU finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, would have preferred. Though the currency bloc has recovered, its ability to survive another challenge without greater common governance and burden-sharing is uncertain. In France, Emmanuel Macron supports such reforms. That challenges Mrs Merkel to say where she stands.

For now she has remained warm but ominously non-committal. On the French president’s first official visit in May she welcomed him with a line of poetry from Hermann Hesse: “Jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne” (A magic dwells in each beginning). She has backed his proposal for a euro-zone finance minister and greater common investments; insiders say she wants to harmonise the corporate-tax rates of the two countries. But a finance minister with what powers? Investments on what scale, paid for by what mechanisms? And is this the same tax harmonisation that has been promised for years? Answers come there none, at least so far.

Another case study is Germany’s growing contribution to international security. The country now has troops deployed in Afghanistan, Mali and Lithuania, where it leads NATO’s military mission. And it has launched a new “Marshall Plan” of investments and co-operation in sub-Saharan Africa, spending some €4bn more to help prevent future refugee crises. All of this would have been unthinkable a few years ago, observes Wolfgang Ischinger of the Munich Security Conference. Moreover, the chancellor has made a commitment to raising defence spending from 1.2% of GDP to the NATO target of 2%—a difference of some €25bn ($30bn) a year by 2024.

Question-marks remain, however. That fewer sub-Saharan Africans are making it to Germany is a product of Italian military and intelligence operations in the Mediterranean and Libya, not the Marshall Plan. And Germans seem to have little appetite for some of the international responsibilities the country already has, let alone new ones it might accrue. According to a poll by the Pew Research Centre in June, just 38% would want to use force to defend a NATO ally under any sort of attack. The closest Mrs Merkel has come to confronting her compatriots with the new realities was when, in May, she told a crowd in Munich: “The time when we could entirely rely on others is somewhat over.” Yet this cryptic comment is better seen as a way of distancing herself from Mr Trump than as new foreign-policy direction.

Rise up singing

Challenged by a journalist in August 2015 to specify what she still wanted to achieve as chancellor, Mrs Merkel offered only platitudes about wanting to fulfil her duty. Two years, a refugee crisis, the advent of Mr Trump and a federal-election campaign later, she has still not answered the question. Mrs Merkel’s CDU manifesto is a perfunctory list of modest correctives, like 15,000 more police officers, increased child benefit, a new digitisation tsar and tighter rules on dual citizenship.

“Enjoy the summer. Vote right in the autumn”, says a CDU poster of a woman snoozing in a sun-dappled meadow. But then what? One day, Mrs Merkel’s time will pass. “I don’t want to be a half-dead wreck when I leave politics,” she said before she became chancellor. When she steps down, if indeed she does, her party will face an uncertain future: she has built up few potential successors. So will her country, with its emergent diplomatic heft bound up with her individual contacts and methods she has picked up. All that will go with her. Germany has enjoyed a long summer living well and gladly under Mrs Merkel’s irenic inaction. Clouds fleck the blue horizon.