Last weekend, as the German election campaign moved into its final week, the Social Democrat candidate managed to insult the entire electorate. Peer Steinbrück approved a cover photo for one of Germany's biggest weekend supplements that showed him thrusting a middle finger at the reader with a sneer of contempt on his face.
It delivered, the pundits agreed, the fatal blow to his chances. But it was also a fitting gaffe to close on, because it worked as a vulgar counterpoint to the hand gesture that has dominated this election: Chancellor Angela Merkel's Raute ("rhombus") – fingers touched carefully together, pointing down, held in front of the abdomen to make a diamond. It's been her trademark for years, but until this election it was little more than a gift to impressionists. Now, with Merkel's popularity by far her government's biggest asset, the Raute has become so much more.
Three weeks before election day her Christian Democrat campaign team unveiled an enormous billboard in the heart of Berlin: on it, Merkel's hands, magnified to monstrous proportions, doing that thing. Those hands are still hanging there, reaching out to the chancellery building just a stone's throw away.
More unnervingly still, the CDU's youth wing go around doing "Merkel hands" themselves, as a sign of loyalty to the leader they have started calling Mutti, or "Mummy". So this already surreal campaign now includes the spectacle of boys who define themselves as Merkel's children forming with their hands something that seems to represent the womb from which they wish they had sprung.
One Social Democrat spluttered that the poster represented "a monstrous, empty, personality cult". But his protest was futile, because Merkel doesn't just inspire loyalty in Germany's callow youth – she inspires it in the entire population.
The psychotherapist Tilmann Moser, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, concluded that Merkel has turned herself into Germany's Madonna, and voters are drawn to her as they are to a holy mother. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, he went on, Merkel does not polarise, but wins over the population through the promise of redemption. In the parlance of psychoanalysis, this is classic transference behaviour: "In such a 'regressive' trust in the mother, one rejects change, one represses one's own doubts, and one raises reliance and devotion to a category way above that of day-to-day politics."
Of course, whenever a woman gets political power, the psychoanalysts come out to play. This was true 13 years ago, at Merkel's ascension to the CDU leadership. Then she was identified as the female Oedipus – who had to kill her political father, Helmut Kohl (whose reign had become toxic in a party donations scandal), to take control. Since Merkel owed so much to Kohl's patriarchal nurturing, their relationship was invested with a dangerous tension: "On the one hand, Merkel was promoted by Kohl, on the other she was always dismissed as 'the girl'," observed the psychoanalyst Thea Bauriedl in an interview with Die Zeit in 2000. Kohl's subconscious message to Merkel was "You are important, but inferior" – a common father-daughter dynamic. Merkel's reaction was patricide.
But today power has turned the girl into a mother. The psychoanalyst Torsten Milsch – author of The Secret Dictatorship of Mothers, appeared on TV channel 3Sat earlier this year to offer his own diagnosis. Picking up on a quotation in which Merkel described how she lived "a schizophrenic life" under the East German dictatorship, hiding her true thoughts from the regime – the analyst concluded that she has adapted this mastery of dissembling her political life so thoroughly that she lacks both "empathy and dialogue ability".
Whatever you make of this, it's true that Merkel's ultra-passive leadership style has created a friction-free zone around her that appears to comfort the electorate. Added to this, many of her policies have been swiped from her centre-left opponents, splitting the difference on key issues. Ultimately, this election only ever had one winner, middle finger or no middle finger.
Ben Knight is a radio and print journalist who writes in English for Deutsche Welle, The Local, Exberliner, and Time Out, and in German for Der Freitag, Fluter, Dummy, and Froh.