Wherever on the campaign trail Mr Wolfgang Schauble goes these days, some member of the public is certain to express the view that the Christian Democrats' parliamentary leader ought to be chancellor.
"When will we finally have an intelligent man like you as chancellor?" asked a young man in a designer suit at a CDU meeting in the east Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg.
Mr Schauble, who has been selected by the Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, as his preferred successor, knows he is Germany's most popular politician, so he took his time replying.
"We've had for the past 16 years a Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who is just as intelligent as me," he said.
Then, reverting to his soft, southern German dialect, he added: "In fact, he's more intelligent than I am."
The audience laughed, partly at Mr Schauble's mocking self-deprecation, but also at the absurdity of the idea that the lumbering, lisping Chancellor could ever match their hero's intellectual agility.
If Germans could choose their chancellor directly at Sunday's election, they would plump for neither Dr Kohl nor his suave Social Democrat challenger, Mr Gerhard Schroder, but for Mr Schauble. As they wait in vain for Dr Kohl's long-promised "last-minute swing" to sweep them back into office, many Christian Democrats are hoping that the Chancellor will swallow his pride in the final days of the campaign and name the date when he will stand down in Mr Schauble's favour.
Amid all the adulation, there is one voter in Germany who believes that Mr Schauble should not become chancellor, his wife, Ingeborg. In an interview with the magazine Stern, she said she believed that, notwithstanding her husband's popularity, the German people would not accept him as chancellor.
"I don't believe it would be easy to convey to the public the image of a chancellor in a wheelchair. I have very great doubts about that," she said.
Mr Schauble has used a wheelchair since an assassination attempt in 1990 and does not expect to walk again. Senior colleagues have whispered doubts about whether Mr Schauble's disability would prevent him from carrying out his duties, but nobody will voice those doubts openly. Except Mr Schauble himself.
"Anyone in a wheelchair who seeks political responsibility at a high level must be prepared not to regard this question as unseemly or distasteful. In America, the state of each president's health is discussed. I don't see anything remarkable in this," he said recently.
Yesterday's opinion poll by the Allensbach Institute suggests that Dr Kohl's comeback may have faltered and that the 68-year-old Christian Democrat is set to become the first German chancellor since the second World War to be voted out of office at an election.
If the Chancellor is defeated, he has promised to step down as party leader immediately, leaving Mr Schauble as the man most likely to become leader of the opposition. There is another possibility. If the Christian Democrats are returned to the Bundestag as the largest party but are unable to form a majority with their current coalition partners, they would be forced into a grand coalition with the Social Democrats.
If this happens, Mr Schauble would almost certainly become chancellor, to the possible dismay of his wife but to the immense satisfaction of Germany's weary voters.
