German Chancellor Angela Merkel has returned from a three-week Alpine holiday to embark Saturday on what may be the most bizarre election campaign in the country's post-war history.
After months of studiously ignoring the race for the September 24th election, Merkel will kick off a series of rallies across the country with an hour-long speech to supporters in the western city of Dortmund.
But just six weeks out from the European Union's top economic power and most populous nation going to the polls, Germans are barely taking notice of the election.
Even after 12 years in power, Merkel, frequently called the world's most powerful woman and Europe's de facto leader, looks set for a fourth term.
Gone are the warnings of her political demise heard at the height of the 2015 refugee influx, when nearly 900,000 asylum seekers entered the country.
Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) lead their closest rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD), by a 12-to-17-point margin, meaning it would take a political earthquake to shift the field at this point. ...
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