German voters have witnessed a remarkable transformation in Angela Merkel in her play for power, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
German politics has taken on a Brechtian quality of late. The last months of the Schröder era was a gangster-capitalist morality fable straight from The Threepenny Opera. Now, with eight weeks to go to an early general election, Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel has begun rehearsals for what could be the role of her life: Mother Courage.
Brecht's Mother Courage earned her nickname by selling soldiers provisions in a war zone. Chancellor Schröder's ruling Social Democrats (SPD) hope to portray her as Brecht intended: a woman who exploits her children's labour for monetary gain until she ultimately destroys them.
But Merkel, a former scientist from East Germany, has a much softer interpretation in mind: a kind of "Mother Courage-to-the-nation" who sells voters hope in a slump.
So far people are buying what she has to sell: her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is 15 points ahead of the SPD in opinion polls and two-thirds of people say they want a change of government with "Mother Courage" for chancellor.
German voters have watched in amusement Merkel's recent change of image. She is now wearing make-up on a regular basis and has swapped the severe page-boy haircut for a softer helmet hair-do. But it is the softening of her rhetoric that is even more dramatic.
Two years ago, Merkel gave a key-note speech saying that only "cuts and savings" could return Germany to health. "There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth," she preached, "but it must be so."
Now Merkel has distanced herself from the biblical and the Brechtian and is looking instead to Italy. Her election appeal to voters could have been lifted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
And though the CDU election programme is brutally clear in its description of Germany's record debt and unemployment, its own election plans have a deckchairs on the Titanic feeling. Political scientists and rivals have been quick to point out that any potentially unpopular measures, such as a plan to raise VAT, are cancelled out by promises of cuts in income and corporate tax.
Germany has a total debt - federal, state and communal - of over €2 trillion, but the CDU appears to be taking with one hand and giving with the other, while backing away from any dramatic reform projects.
As one CDU MP close to Merkel told Der Spiegel magazine: "An honest election programme in Germany is a sure fire way of never having to implement it."
Despite carefully avoiding any talk of reforms with a reform-jaded public, however, the CDU opinion poll honeymoon appears already to be dwindling. The party's likely coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) still has a 13-point lead over the current SPD-Green coalition, but it can no longer be certain of an absolute majority.
The CDU-FDP lead is slipping away week by week to the Left Party, an electoral marriage of convenience between the reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a left-wing SPD splinter group headed by former finance minister and Schröder rival Oskar Lafontaine.
Just weeks after coming into existence, a poll for ARD public television gave the Left Party 12 per cent support - some five million votes - theoretically making it the third strongest party in German politics. In eastern states, where the reformed communists traditionally did well, the Left Party has a third of the vote.
The party's anti-reform rhetoric is music to the ears of left-wing SPD voters. A third of those who say they will vote for the Left Party in September voted for Mr Schröder in 2003. Another source of support, according to opinion polls, are stay-at-home voters - nearly a quarter of the Left Party's support base is drawn from here. Worrying for the CDU is the news that it has lost 350,000 voters to the Left Party.
The established parties can take some comfort from the fact that two-thirds of voters believe the Left Party only offers populist demands without the ability to solve any problems. But even if the Left Party just cleared the 5 per cent hurdle to get into the Bundestag - as seems likely - it will be enough to turn the German four-party system on its head.
If a CDU-FDP coalition fails to win a majority, the most likely solution would be a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, like the one that ruled for three years in the 1960s. Indeed, a grand coalition is the option that over 40 per cent of voters feel can best solve Germany's problems, according to the ARD poll.
But the opinion polls present another tantalising possibility: a coalition between the SPD, Greens and the new Left Wing party. The three parties have 48 per cent in the polls, neck-and-neck with the CDU-FDP.
Such a government would be unthinkable with the current leadership - chancellor Schröder will never sit at the cabinet table with Oskar Lafontaine. But the SPD already governs with the reformed communist PDS in two eastern state coalitions. The Social Democrats are stuck at 27 per cent in the polls, but party leaders are holding their electoral fire until August.
And so all eyes return to Angela Merkel. Just six months ago she was the subject of a running joke that if she became chancellor it would be in spite of, not because of, her own political party.
Despite the current jubilation at the prospect of power, there is no love lost between Merkel and leading figures within the CDU, in particular the state premiers in western Germany who see Merkel as an unwelcome imposition.
They all agreed a pact while members of the CDU youth organisation in the 1970s to divide power between them in the future.
But German unification intervened, and Angela Merkel elbowed them aside to take the top job after the Helmut Kohl slush fund scandal.
Chancellor Schröder's decision to bring forward the election has helped Merkel's chances enormously, but it has not changed the fact that she has little rapport with senior party figures.
"She has no power basis in the party. Think of the basis of Helmut Kohl," said Otto Graf Lambsdorff, a Kohl economics minister and FDP elder statesman, to Die Zeit newspaper. "She has state premiers that are recalcitrant in a way I cannot imagine SPD premiers being towards an SPD candidate."
The afterglow of an election win might convince some of Merkel's state premier rivals to join her cabinet table and submit to her authority, but her strongest state premier rivals are likely to stay put, sharpen their knives and bide their time.
Germany's general election campaign has begun and Merkel's political honeymoon is coming to an end. In six lengthy newspaper interviews so far, she has managed to betray no clue about her plans.
Perhaps the desire to be elected has eclipsed any desire to prescribe, or administer, the kind of harsh reform medicine Merkel has demanded for years from the opposition benches. Or perhaps, once in office, "Mother Courage" will turn into "Mack the Knife".