German elections: special coverage RFI Analysis: Merkel optimistic as German go to the polls

AFP - Germans voted in a national election Sunday with Angela Merkel tipped to win a new mandate to jumpstart Europe's ailing top economy as the country agonises over its role in Afghanistan.
  
Polls indicated the conservative Merkel, Germany's first female chancellor, was near certain to secure a second term, but her hopes of forming a new centre-right alliance with a business-friendly party hung by a thread.
  
Heightened security after warnings from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other Islamic militants over Germany's increasingly bloody mission in Afghanistan also cast a shadow over voting.
  
Merkel wants to banish her junior partners in the loveless "grand coalition", the Social Democrats (SPD), to the opposition benches and take up with the Free Democrats (FDP), the team she says is needed to relieve Germany's steepest post-war downturn.
  
But her Christian Democrat party's lead has narrowed as her SPD challenger, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, found his footing in the final weeks of the campaign.
  
A Forsa survey Friday put Merkel's preferred coalition on 47 percent of the vote, which experts say may not be enough to form a government.
  
The most likely alternative would be another grand coalition.
  
Nevertheless, the 55-year-old Merkel, Forbes magazine's most powerful woman on the planet for four years running, said she was confident of putting together the alliance she wants.
  
"I am always optimistic," she told the mass-circulation Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
  
"Voters will decide tomorrow how quickly we get out of this crisis," Merkel told a final rally Saturday. "We are fighting for the German jobs of the future."
  
A beaming Steinmeier, 53, was also upbeat as he cast his ballot in Berlin.
  
"I am very confident we will have a strong SPD -- a strong SPD that will be able to lead the government from the top this time," he said.
  
Sporting a red jacket, Merkel also cast her ballot in Berlin around 1100 GMT but did not speak to reporters assembled at the polling station.
  
Turnout was relatively low by 1200 GMT at 36.1 percent, compared to 41.9 percent at the same time four years ago, amid sunny warm weather throughout the country.
  
Awaiting the winner of this pivotal election is a bulging in-tray of problems.
  
Unemployment is forecast to shoot higher, with health care, education and the bloated social-security system in dire need of reform. Public finances are in tatters and its population ageing fast.
  
Abroad, the main challenge is Afghanistan, where Germany has around 4,200 troops in the NATO force ensnared in the eighth year of an ever bloodier struggle with insurgents.
  
The mission, opposed by most voters, may become a major domestic headache for Merkel if violence worsens in the north of the war-ravaged country where Germany's soldiers are based.
  
Security across Germany has been tight in the run-up to election day following a series of threats from Islamic militants over the country's presence in Afghanistan.
  
With all of the main parties in the Bundestag lower house supporting the deployment, with the exception of the far-left Die Linke, the Afghan mission has failed to register as much of an issue in a largely uninspiring campaign.
  
But the war may become a battleground in the next parliament, particularly if the SPD finds itself in opposition.
  
If there is not sufficient effort to build up the Afghan army and police, "the US will have a second Vietnam, and Germany its first," the Berliner Zeitung daily said in an editorial last week.
  
Troops in Afghanistan have already registered their votes by postal ballot before home polling stations opened Sunday.
  
The first exit poll results were due at around 1600 GMT.
  
However, due to Germany's complex electoral arithmetic, the initial outcome could prove unclear.
  
Experts estimate that Merkel and the FDP may need as much as 48 percent of votes to form a coalition, possibly turning election night into a cliffhanger.