"Team Angie" embark on final sprint to German election day The select black T-shirts said it all: "Stay cool, and choose the chancellor." The ubiquitous orange ones simply proclaimed: "Team Deutschland." Seven thousand Christian Democrat supporters came to Düsseldorf to cheer Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, on Sunday and launch the final spurt of an election campaign that she has dominated from the start. Huge posters of the chancellor's face plastered the pillars and walls of the ice-hockey stadium in a blatant demonstration of how her ruling party is seeking to exploit the popularity of Ms Merkel to sweep it back to office in the general election on September 22. She faced a sea of orange T-shirts, and cardboard orange hats, and posters with one word: "Angie!," as if to orchestrate the chanting that greeted her arrival at the rally. They used a Beatles band to warm up the audience, hammering out old favourites to encourage a feel-good mood in the crowd. It was good old-fashioned nostalgia with old favourites such as "It's Been a Hard Day's Night," or "Twist and Shout," belted out to an adoring audience. Perhaps the most appropriate song for the occasion was "She Loves You," although perhaps the real message was that they love her. Personalities do not normally dominate politics in Germany, where elections are a matter of choosing a complicated coalition government to rule the land. But if anyone can hope to swing an election, it is Ms Merkel in Germany today. The principal, abiding image of the CDU campaign is an advertisement featuring the chancellor's hands in her most popular pose - her fingers held together in the shape of a diamond. It has been plastered across the biggest election billboard in the land, outside the main railway station in Berlin. In Düsseldorf it was much more discreet: supporters in black T-shirts bore the simple slogan of diamond hands: "stay cool." And that was the message of the chancellor, as she deliberately delivered a downbeat speech, hammering away at her main campaign themes: free choice for families on schools and jobs, decent pensions for the low paid and mothers who have stayed at home to look after their children, minimum wages for the lowest paid, but no tax rises for the better off, as the opposition wants. She has stolen the middle ground of German politics from the centre-left opposition, insisting that the country should be one "where the stronger help the weaker," and where there are opportunities for all. But she also attacked the opposition for wanting to tell people how they should behave, and raise their taxes. "We don't try to tell people what food they should eat," she said, mocking the Green party for suggesting that everyone should have one meat-free day every week. She defended her eurozone crisis management, too, insisting that holding the eurozone together was a fundamental national interest for Germany. "Europe for Germany is like a second side of our homeland," she declared. Europe stood for freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Thanks to European integration, there were no conflicts any more over such fundamental values. Yet the real message from Ms Merkel is very simple: Trust Me. I am a safe pair of hands. I think before I act. You know me by now, so don't vote for change. Behind the razzmatazz of the reception, however, was a more urgent message for the faithful. The election isn't over yet. It will be a very tight race," as Hermann Gröhe, general-secretary of the Christian Democratic Union, spelt it out before the chancellor arrived. He quoted the latest poll figures from Bild am Sonntag, the mass circulation Sunday newspaper, showing that the CDU, with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and its coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats, are on a combined 45 per cent. The opposition combination of Social Democrats and Greens may be "far behind," he admitted, but if you include the far-left Linke party, their combined support is exactly the same as Ms Merkel's - 45 per cent. If the party faithful relaxed, and assumed Ms Merkel was certain to be back as chancellor, Germany could face a coalition between the SPD, the Green party, and the far-left Linke party, she warned. So every speaker repeated the same message. In a two-vote system, where one vote goes to individual candidates, and the second to a party, "you must give both votes to the CDU," said Ms Merkel. It was a grim warning to the party faithful not to vote tactically, by giving their second votes to the liberal FDP, to ensure that their coalition partners get the minimum 5 per cent needed to win seats in the Bundestag.