German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger — ministerial colleague and Foreign Minister — Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) battled on Saturday to win over a large pool of undecided voters on the last day of campaigning before a federal election.

Merkel told a rally in Berlin, hours after arriving from the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, that her conservatives must use the final campaign hours to convince the one-third of voters who pollsters say have yet to make up their minds.

Security has been tight after a series of al-Qaeda videos this week threatening a “rude awakening” for Germany if voters back a government that supports keeping troops in Afghanistan. Police in Stuttgart said on Friday they had arrested a 25-year old Turkish man they suspect of posting one of the threatening videos on the Internet.

Merkel is confident she will be the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and sister party Christian Social Union’s (CSU) nominee for yet another term as Chancellor.

Most experts say that Merkel, who is largely credited with having steered the country out of the recession, is a certainty as the next Chancellor.

“The only thing that is still undecided is who her allies would be. While her party’s official line is that it would like to form the next government in alliance with the Free Democrats (FDP), it is no secret that Merkel would like nothing better than a continuation of the current formulation, better known as the Grand Coalition, in which her party rules the country along with the SPD. She knows that the numbers of CDU-CSU plus the FDP might not be enough to get a majority,” says Prof Heinrich Oberreuter, Director of the Academy for Civil Education, Munich, and a renowned political observer.

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