SUPERSIZED and without commentary, a pair of hands went up the other day on the side of a building just outside Berlin’s main train station, with Germany’s parliament and government buildings in clear view. The idiosyncratic bracing of thumb and fingers made the digits on the poster instantly recognisable as belonging to Angela Merkel, who is up for re-election as chancellor on September 22nd. The “Merkel rhombus” has become something of a symbol.

Asked about it, she replies, in a disarming and characteristic deadpan, that she adopted the position to solve a practical problem, as any trained scientist would (she earned her PhD with a dissertation on quantum chemistry). The problem was what to do with those hands. The solution was to neutralise them against each other, which happens to be pleasingly symmetrical and also pushes the shoulders up, improving posture.

The explanation is pure Merkel—unpretentious, pragmatic, artfully plain. With a similarly choreographed candour she has let it be known that she likes to cook potato soup for her husband (a scientist who otherwise stays out of public view). She does her own shopping, occasionally getting lost in the supermarket aisles. Mrs Merkel “fits the cliché that we Germans have of ourselves: frugal, sombre, awkward and a bit unpolished in a likeable way,” says Ralph Bollmann, author of one of a ream of biographies published this year. That common touch, he thinks, is why the Germans identify so much with their chancellor that in the past few years they have started to call her Mutti—“Mum”.

The rhombus makes for a striking poster. As telling, though, is what the huge poster lacks. There is only one tiny bit of text: the initials CDU, tucked in the corner. They stand for the Christian Democratic Union, the centre-right party that Mrs Merkel leads, a big tent of churchgoers, conservatives and free-market liberals. Parties and platforms, not personalities, are supposed to play the lead role in German parliamentary elections. But this time, for the CDU, Mrs Merkel’s person is the platform.

What is that platform’s content? Outside Germany, Mrs Merkel is identified above all with a particular stance in the euro crisis, one which says it can only be solved with “austerity” (meaning brutal budget cuts) on the part of formerly profligate governments and wider economic reforms to make the entire euro zone competitive again. This explains the cheeky banners Irish football fans held up during last year’s European championship: “Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work”. It also accounts for the odious posters of Mrs Merkel defaced with a Hitler moustache brandished by demonstrators in Greece.

Ganz, Schön, Lustig

Germans see things differently. Mrs Merkel has achieved close to nothing of what she promised in previous election manifestos. There has been no overall tax simplification, for example, only a few giveaways to special interests. She has undertaken no big reform—the last one, liberalising Germany’s labour market, occurred a decade ago under her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. Where she has made bold domestic changes, above all in deciding to give up nuclear power after the 2011 disaster at Fukushima in Japan, she has been adopting policies already favoured by the opposition parties. To Germans, therefore, Mrs Merkel is the opposite of ideological. She is a caregiver, like a Mutti, not a taskmaster, like her Irish or Greek caricatures.

By temperament, Mrs Merkel tries to slow political processes down. She also tries to break down problems into discrete units, observing and testing each solution separately before moving on to the next, as a good scientist would. That is what she has done in successive Brussels summits dealing with the euro crisis. Where the world saw a dogmatic Prussian forcing others to be disciplined, the Germans saw a chancellor giving ground to demands from crisis countries and France (on bail-outs, rescue funds and banking union), but cautiously and in the smallest possible increments. As taxpayers, Germans felt she was protecting them even as they understood that more concessions might follow. Mr Bollmann sees this ability to accustom the Germans gradually to new realities, and to know when they are ready to accept more, as Mrs Merkel’s particular genius.

Her “politics of small steps” is communicated in a way her countrymen appreciate and foreigners find baffling. Mrs Merkel speaks with soothing tones and simple, reassuring phrases which often have little content—a “sanitised Lego language, snapping together prefabricated phrases made of hollow plastic,” as Timothy Garton Ash at Oxford University describes it. In part, Mr Garton Ash allows, this is just the modern German fashion. “Because of Hitler, the palette of contemporary German political rhetoric is deliberately narrow, cautious, and boring.” But Mrs Merkel has taken it to new extremes of moderation.

Peer Steinbrück, who as leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) is her main rival in the elections, parodies her well. When he says, “A good foundation is the best precondition for a solid basis in Europe, ladies and gentlemen,” it usually brings the house down because it really does sound like Mrs Merkel. In so doing it allows Mr Steinbrück to position himself, in contrast, as one who dishes out “straight talk”—Klartext. To Mr Steinbrück’s frustration, however, his straight talk often leads to gaffes. When he says that he would not pay less than €5 ($6.63) for a bottle of Pinot Grigio the German public spends a few days affecting outrage that a Social Democrat with blue-collar interests at heart would say such a thing. But when Mrs Merkel does her Mutti-talk, she gets away with it.

Once and future chancellors A more personal lunge at Mrs Merkel over the euro crisis missed the mark. Trying to make her incrementalism into a shortcoming, Mr Steinbrück suggested that Mrs Merkel lacked “feeling” for the European project because she spent the first 36 years of her life in East Germany, outside the European Communities from which the EU grew. It is true that she has a different (though not necessarily lesser) emotional connection to the EU than that felt, say, by Helmut Kohl, the pro-French CDU chancellor who oversaw German reunification and the conception of the euro and who brought Mrs Merkel into national politics. But as Mr Steinbrück discovered, a lot of people were offended that he could suspect Mrs Merkel of insufficient euro-passion merely because she grew up an Ossi (easterner).

A good bit of what passes for campaign fisticuffs between these two politicians is in fact kabuki. They know and respect each other. In Mrs Merkel’s first term, from 2005 to 2009, she led a “grand coalition” between the CDU and the SPD (see chart 1) with Mr Steinbrück as her finance minister. They worked well together. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the two gave a joint press conference to assure German savers that their bank deposits were safe. That image endures as the moment when the German public calmed down. Both are also known for a wry sense of humour. In Mr Steinbrück’s case, it is broadly ironic (he blames his Danish grandmother for teaching it to him). Mrs Merkel’s humour tends nowadays to be low-key and reserved for private occasions, or at least situations removed from the public glare. The block of flats in which she lives has fewer tenants than it did, for security reasons; so her doorbell, marked discreetly with her husband’s name, Sauer, sits in a row with others marked Ganz, Schön, Lustig, Schön, Ganz (roughly translated: really quite funny, quite really). She is also a woman of culture and emotion. The risk of controversy does not stop her attending the Wagner festival in Bayreuth every summer; while she will sit through and enjoy the Ring Cycle, her particular favourite is said to be “Tristan and Isolde”, with its morbid and tragic beauty.

A good foundation

One of the problems for the SPD and the other large opposition party, the Greens, in running against Mrs Merkel is that, in an admirable display of responsibility, they both voted with her at every step in the euro-rescue. Yes, the Greens, in particular, would have liked to go faster and would have been open to Eurobonds (issued separately by each euro-zone government but guaranteed by all), which Mrs Merkel has ruled out. Bolder action at the beginning might have nipped the crisis in the bud, says Jürgen Trittin, a leading Green; instead Mrs Merkel “always delays, then eventually does what we said”. But to most Germans, this just sounds like nitpicking.

Predict the German election result with our interactive coalition tracker More annoyingly for Mr Trittin, voters now have the same blurred view of the parties’ differences in energy policy. For most of the 30 years since the Greens entered parliament, their signature demand was for Germany to say Nein, Danke to nuclear power. Having previously backed nuclear power, in the days after Fukushima, Mrs Merkel made the most abrupt volte-face of her career. She decided to start turning the plants off and to exit nuclear power altogether by 2022. For the Greens, this should have been a huge victory. Instead, it allowed Mrs Merkel to neutralise the entire subject. The En ergiewende (“energy turn”), which also encompasses a large and generously subsidised push into renewable energy, means putting up prices when in competitors such as America energy is getting cheaper; this looks worrying to some businesspeople. But there is a consensus behind it among all the main parties. Mr Trittin is reduced to bickering about operational details (power lines and so forth) rather than attacking Mrs Merkel head-on. This is part of a pattern that has been called Merkelvellianism. By small, sly moves, Mrs Merkel has inched the CDU leftward, poaching one policy after another from her centre-left rivals. For decades the CDU favoured military conscription. Then Mrs Merkel abolished the draft, as the left wanted. When the SPD and Greens promised a minimum wage, Mrs Merkel quickly put forth a similar idea (albeit with flexible wage floors across regions and industries). When old-age poverty became the issue earlier this year, she promised to provide higher pensions for older mothers. When the left called for rent controls this summer, she supported them, too. On only one weighty subject does she squarely oppose the left. They want to raise taxes; she does not. Mr Steinbrück reaches for every available metaphor to paint Mrs Merkel as a plagiarist lacking any conviction. Living in a country run by her is like driving endlessly round a roundabout—few fender benders but also no direction; her finger doesn’t point the way but only measures which way the wind is blowing: and so forth. Mrs Merkel drives some people in her own centre-right camp just as batty. A book by a veteran CDU adviser calls her Germany’s “godmother”—in the mafia, not the maternal, sense—a person with no values who betrays the ones held by the CDU whenever it suits her. Peter Kohl, the estranged son of the former chancellor, has said that he will abstain from voting because Germany now has, in effect, three social-democratic parties: the SPD, the Greens and Mrs Merkel’s CDU. Outside Germany, she is seen as unbending. (“Austerit ät, that new word: it sounds so evil,” Mrs Merkel jokes in her aw-shucks way.) Inside Germany, she looks as stiff as a plateful of spaghetti.

The best precondition

There is strategic method in her flexibility. By creeping into the political terrain of the opposition parties, Mrs Merkel hopes to reduce their supporters’ readiness to go to the polls. In doing so she knows that she will induce some CDU supporters to stay at home, too. But as long as she dampens turnout more for the parties of the left than for her own, she wins. Her political consultants call it “asymmetric demobilisation”.

It is not an elegant or very principled strategy, but it seems a workable one. The CDU is the strongest party, with about 40% in most polls. Though it will not secure an absolute majority, most coalition scenarios play out well for Mrs Merkel. One possibility is a continued partnership between the CDU, its Bavarian sister party (the CSU) and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), her current coalition partner. Another possibility, which would provide a bigger majority but trickier internal politics, is a grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD like the one that Mrs Merkel ran in her first term. Mr Steinbrück has said that he would not serve in such a government again, but that is not in itself a deal breaker.

A third option is a pact with the Greens. This is less likely because the Greens are at the moment further to the left than the SPD on such issues as tax hikes. But there are moderate greens, especially in south-western Germany. And the party, which shares power in six states, and has shared it with the CDU at state level in the past, is hungry for a return to federal government.

By contrast, an SPD-Green coalition, the only one that Mr Steinbrück has said he would accept, has almost no chance of winning a majority. The only remaining risk to Mrs Merkel is thus an alliance between all the parties of the left, including the party called the Left. But the Left is a pariah in mainstream politics because of its roots in East Germany’s communist party and its goal of leaving or dissolving NATO. Mr Steinbrück wants no part in such a “red-red-green” pact, though others in his party could enter one without him.

Mrs Merkel thus has a good chance of staying in power. A victory would not be an endorsement of her domestic record, since that record is muddled. Instead, it would show that Germans forgive her for not having clear visions at home because she has governed during such unusual times. The global financial crisis began in her first term and spilled over into the euro crisis in her second. Disaster management took precedence over domestic reform.

And Germany has without question managed the crisis well (see chart 2). Tax revenues are gushing; the federal government could start repaying its debt in 2015. Youth unemployment is the lowest in Europe. Part of this is down to luck. Germany happens to be good at making the industrial goods that strong economies like China have been demanding. Part of it is down to Mr Schröder’s reforms, which made Germany’s labour market more flexible. But what Germans see is that, while many of its EU partners are struggling, Germany under Mrs Merkel looks strong. If Mrs Merkel has a vision, it is that the euro zone and the entire EU should become strong, too. “I experienced the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, I don’t want to see the EU falling behind,” she has said. Her advisers believe that the trauma of 1989 informs her view of the euro zone today. Mrs Merkel often adds a statistic: that Europe has 7% of the world’s population, 25% of its output and 50% of its welfare spending. This is her way of warning that the status quo may not be affordable for much longer.

A solid basis in Europe

Europe “has no legal right to be leading in world history,” she says. “So we have to be careful that solidarity also leads to results, lest we all get weak together.” This message is aimed in part at France, Germany’s longtime partner, which is not reforming as fast as Mrs Merkel would like. In part, she is addressing Spain, Portugal and Greece, to encourage them to keep reforming. And in part she is talking, softly but sternly, to the Germans, lest they forget that as recently as the 1990s, Germany was called “the sick man of Europe”.

Keeping the European family healthy takes never-ending hard work and forbearance, says the Protestant pastor’s daughter and Mutti of her nation. For an otherwise protean woman, such sentiments probably do come from conviction.