Merkel nourishes her electorate by revealing recipe for potato soup
Chancellor gets personal in interview as poll shows half of Germans are undecided on which party to vote for
ANGELA MERKEL, the German chancellor, has deployed a potent political weapon as campaigning intensifies ahead of German elections: sharing her secret recipe for potato soup.
With a poll showing that almost half of Germans have yet to decide who to vote for in next month’s election, Mrs Merkel fell back on the time-honoured tradition of showing her human side by sharing a recipe with a glossy magazine.
In typical down-to-earth style, she chose a simple everyday staple that is eaten at home by families across Germany: potato soup.
“I always pound the potatoes myself with a potato masher, not with a blender,” she told Bunte magazine. “That way, you get some chunky pieces left in the mash.”
Mrs Merkel told the magazine she likes to use potatoes from her own garden at her country cottage in the Uckermark region north of Berlin. “They’re looking good, but I haven’t started harvesting them yet this year,” she said.
The German chancellor also let slip that she likes to eat late at night.
The interview came as the findings of an opinion poll released yesterday appeared to throw the election race wide open.
With a month to go before polling day, 46 per cent of voters have yet to make up their minds which party to support, according to the survey for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. A fourth Merkel victory had seemed almost a foregone conclusion, with her Christian Democrat party (CDU) 16 points ahead of its nearest rival, the Social Democrats (SPD) led by Martin Schulz.
But the large number of undecided voters could throw those calculations into disarray. The CDU is on 39.5 per cent in the new poll, ahead of the SPD on 24 per cent.
The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) are in third place on 10 per cent. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AFD), seen as the main threat to Mrs Merkel for much of last year, has dropped to sixth place on just seven per cent.
Mrs Merkel’s interview with Bunte is in keeping with her long and carefully cultivated image as a down-to-earth politician who can connect with the concerns of ordinary voters.
It is not even the first time she has deployed potato soup as a political weapon. Ahead of the 2009 election she told voters it was one of her favourite meals, together with roulade and red cabbage.
In previous years, she has said she likes to relax by baking her husband’s favourite plum cake, and that there is never enough crumble on top for him.
Mrs Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, is a professor of quantum chemistry. He came up again this year when she praised him for helping with the shopping.
“His help gives me the chance to concentrate on the election campaign,” she said.
If the image of Prof Sauer popping out to do the shopping seems a little far-fetched, Mrs Merkel is quite frequently spotted buying groceries at her local supermarket in Berlin, where she pays in cash.
Mrs Merkel spoke out against President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and his pledge to “Make America great again” in a separate webchat for Handelsblatt newspaper this week.
“An America that cares for nothing in the world but itself will not be a great America,” she said.