A personality-driven campaign and a mistake-prone opposition have helped Merkel. | REUTERS Third term likely for Angela Merkel

BERLIN — She’s known alternately as the “Teflon Chancellor” because her opponents’ criticism never seems to stick, and as “Mutti” for the motherly figure many voters see her as.

Angela Merkel has led Germany through eight tumultuous years as chancellor, and voters here are poised to give her another four on Sunday when they head to the polls for a federal election. Forget the eurozone crisis and tough economic times that have plagued the country’s neighbors. Germany is doing just fine, thank you, and its people see little reason not to stay the course with Merkel and her center-right Christian Democratic Union party.


The NSA surveillance scandal and the controversy earlier this month about a possible U.S. strike on Syria have roiled the race but ultimately had no discernable effect on Merkel’s popularity. What’s more, she has benefited from mistake-prone opposition that’s led voters to see her government as preferable to any of the alternatives.

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“There is not a real longing for political change this year,” said Peter Matuschek, chief political analyst for the German polling firm, Forsa. “Although not everyone is satisfied with every aspect of the government, in general people do not feel the opposition would do any better.”

Merkel and the CDU are widely expected to coast to victory. In a poll this week from Forsa, the CDU took 39 percent, compared with 25 percent for the center-left Social Democratic Union.

“The CDU might end up at a little under 40 percent, but it’s clear that they are the strongest party and that Merkel will remain chancellor — this is something we can already say,” Matuschek said. “The question that remains is what coalition will be the outcome.”

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Merkel’s party has run a personality-driven campaign, focusing on herself and capitalizing on her popularity rather than the party’s identity or issues.

The CDU’s posters, up around the entire country, feature a smiling Merkel along with the campaign slogan “Gemeinsam erfolgreich,” which means “Successful together.” The posters don’t even include her name, just her photo.

And the party’s TV ad — each party just releases one main TV ad for the entire campaign — features Merkel speaking direct-to-camera for the entire 90 seconds. (The SPD’s ad, by contrast, only shows chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück for a few seconds at the end.)

Merkel’s CDU even went as far as to buy a giant, 25,833-square-foot billboard across from Berlin’s central train station with a photo of Merkel’s signature diamond hand gesture. The photo is made up of 2,000 individual photos of supporters and says, “Put Germany’s future in good hands.”

“The CDU doesn’t have a campaign: the campaign is Angela Merkel,” said Sudha David-Wilp, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “It’s all about the cult of personality … this is the first election in a very long time where I see people identifying more with the candidate than the party.”

It doesn’t hurt that Merkel’s main opposition has stumbled along the way, experts say — making her look even more competent in comparison.

Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück, Merkel’s main opponent, has gotten himself in trouble with verbal gaffes over the course of the campaign. He also raised eyebrows in Germany when he appeared on the cover of last week’s Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine flipping the camera off. Steinbrück’s middle finger has become arguably the most memorable image of the SPD candidate of the entire campaign.

“Steinbrück … is unpredictable, but Merkel appears pretty much predictable: people know what they get when they give her their vote,” said Jan Philipp Burgard, a journalist and political scientist who has covered elections in both Germany and the United States. “People think she’s smart, that she’s taking her time in making decisions, she’s not making decisions spontaneously.”

Voters also see Merkel as down-to-earth, a sentiment that’s only grown this year as she’s made an effort to share more personal details about her life. She’s talked in interviews about what she eats for breakfast, her favorite things to cook at home and how she gets her hair to stay put during a long day of work.

Though Germany’s chancellors aren’t elected directly, hypothetical head-to-head matchups show Merkel leading Steinbrück by double-digit margins.

“(Merkel’s) popularity rates really help the Christian Democrats to improve in the polls, while Steinbrück had a negative effect on his party’s preferences,” Matuschek said.

Merkel, projecting an air of confidence, maintained a low-key election schedule until the final few weeks of the campaign. She even took a long vacation, hiking with her husband in the south Tyrol region of Austria, less than two months before the election.

“It’s not that she led a winning campaign, she just sort of maintained the profile of being [a] calm, cool, collected leader,” said David-Wilp.

The 2013 Transatlantic Trends survey, out from the German Marshall Fund on Wednesday, found that just under two-thirds of Germans approve of her handling of the eurozone crisis.

“You can argue if (Merkel’s) politics are good or bad, but the perception of the majority of Germans is that we are doing fine in this crisis, that there isn’t any crisis in day-to-day life,” Burgard said. “And Merkel is getting credit for that.”

He added that Merkel has been skilled at moving her party to the center on certain issues, like climate change, helping it serve as a moderate alternative to voters who aren’t happy with parties on the left. As a result, he said, people who may not have considered voting for the CDU before she took office are doing so now.

Still, even though a Merkel and CDU victory is widely expected on Sunday night, it’s much less clear which party will be Merkel’s coalition partner in the new government. That means the most surprising part of the German election may well happen after Election Day.

Merkel’s current coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, has been bleeding support in the polls, and some political observers even question whether it will get the 5 percent needed to win seats in the Bundestag, the German parliament. The possible rise of several new, smaller parties — especially the anti-Euro Alternative for Germany (AfD) — could provide some surprises on election night as well.

If the FDP doesn’t get enough support on Sunday, Merkel and the CDU may be forced to enter a “grand coalition” with the SPD, their primary opposition party.

“It’s very questionable whether the current government will continue,” David-Wilp said. “It’s all going to come down to the math after Germans go to the polls on Sunday.”