NOVEMBER 9, 1989. An epic night for Germany and the wider world, as the Berlin Wall finally came down. Berliners, east and west, were giddy with delight, and celebrated all night long. But a 35-year-old woman kept to her normal routine that night, including a visit to a sauna. She paid a brief celebratory visit to the west side of the Wall, drinking just one beer, before returning home as she had work to go to the following day. The ever-pragmatic Angela Merkel later observed: “I figured if the Wall had opened it was hardly going to close again.”

Twenty-eight years later, Merkel – "Mutti" (mother) to the German public – is today poised to win her fourth successive term as Chancellor of Germany. The latest polls put her centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) far ahead of its closest rival, Martin Schulz’s Social Democrats.

The election has been described as boring and predictable, and much of the attention has focused on whether Alternative for Germany (AfD), a grouping established only in 2013, will become the first right-wing nationalist party to win seats in the Bundestag since the Second World War.

Despite being the most powerful woman in the world, despite having led her country since 2005, Merkel remains something of an enigma at home and abroad. As a recent BBC profile had it, her exceedingly low-profile second husband, Joachim Sauer, and her confidantes “form a circle around her as impenetrable as the thick forests of the Uckermark region where she grew up.”

Angela Kasner was born in Hamburg in 1954 but, not long after she was born, her father, an official in the Lutheran Church, took the family into the the East German GDR so that he could take up duties there. Merkel was raised in the town of Templin, north of Berlin. The family lived in a seminary at Waldhof, which was also home to a large number of handicapped people, who lived and worked there. Years later, says The New Yorker, Merkel would recall: “To grow up in the neighbourhood of handicapped people was an important experience for me. I learned back then to treat them in a very normal way.”

Though she was physically clumsy, according to the magazine, she was a brilliant, dedicated student from her earliest days, and she went on to study physics at Leipzig University and obtain a doctorate in quantum chemistry in Berlin.

She worked at the East German Academy of Sciences and was just 23 when she married a physics student, Ulrich Merkel, taking his surname. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. It’s said that after her divorce, she lived like a squatter in an illegal apartment; and when she turned 30, her father came to visit, telling her: “You haven’t gotten very far.”

Her active political career began when she helped out in the office of Democratic Awakening, which would evolve into the CDU. In 1990, post-reunification, Helmut Kohl, the then Chancellor, gave the bright and assiduous Merkel, his protégée, the Cabinet post of women and youth. She held other posts before becoming the CDU’s first female leader in 2000. When federal elections were held five years later, she became Germany’s first-ever female Chancellor, head of a coalition that included the CDU, the Christian Social Union and the Social Democrats.

Merkel had not exactly sparkled as a stump speaker, and the CDU did not perform as well as it hoped, but one biographer of Merkel cautioned that it would never do to underestimate her and that she habitually got the better of her male enemies. So it has proved.

Today, at the age of 63, Merkel is poised to achieve a fourth successive victory. She has weathered the fall-out from her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s doors to more than one million refugees, arguing that Germany was facing a “humanitarian emergency”. But the influx of new-comers has given rise to many anxious questions in Germany, spurred by, amongst other things, the terror attack in Berlin last Christmas by an asylum-seeker from Tunisia. It has also fuelled the rise of AfD, which wants to shut the country’s borders.

Many overseas politicians have admired Merkel. Tony Blair, who met her before her 2005 victory, wrote in his memoirs: “She seemed at first rather shy, even aloof, but she had a twinkle that swiftly came through.” Nick Clegg, noting that the CDU’s success has come to rely on Merkel’s “matriarchal appeal”, said he had often heard Merkel speak in “forensic” detail about Ukraine, and that her knowledge, “not to mention her complex relationship with Vladimir Putin, forged in fluent Russian, was greater than could be mustered across the whole of Whitehall.”

In addition to running Germany, of course, Merkel has been keeping an equally forensic eye on the Brexit negotiations, and trying to shape a new Europe once Britain quits.

Merkel may appear conventional in public but there is no doubting her considerable political skills. “Her climb to the top and her 12-year tenure”, the New York Times said last week, “have proven her a masterful political practitioner, one who has seized opportunity, eliminated opponents and sustained popular support.” The nickname of “Mutti”, originally meant as an insult, has been adopted by the public as a token of trust, it added.

In private, Merkel likes opera, hiking and cooking, and is known to pay in cash for groceries at ordinary supermarkets. But a recent piece of Berlin cabaret theatre once again sought to discover what it is that makes the real Merkel tick. How instructive, you might think, that even after 12 long years, this is an aspect of the Chancellor that should still excite intrigue.