But in four weeks voters look like they might tell the chancellor, who achieved German unification after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that they no longer want him as their leader.

Try as he might by criss-crossing the country in a final whirl of campaign stops, Mr Kohl has failed to close the gap on his telegenic Social Democrat (SPD) challenger Gerhard Schröder.

Kohl dismisses opinion polls which show his Christian Democrats between three and seven points adrift of Mr Schröder's SPD.

"This election will be decided in the last three weeks," the 68-year-old chancellor said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.

But it is virtually impossible to find a pollster - or even some members of Mr Kohl's CDU - who think Mr Kohl can convince Germany's 60 million voters to return him for a record fifth term on September 27.

For many Germans record unemployment, high taxes and an increasingly unaffordable welfare state cloud the earlier diplomatic and political achievements of Mr Kohl's 16 years at the helm.

"He has been in politics since the mid-seventies, and you must not forget there are more than 20 years of people who always saw the same face," said Rolf Kruse, a senior figure in Hamburg's Christian Democratic Union.

"In a modern television democracy, it's a bit boring. Not that people are looking for a real change. It's more a change of arguments, not a change of politics themselves."

Kohl has been written off before - even before he became a chancellor for the first time in 1982. But those hoping that Helmut Kohl can once again be a comeback kid may be sorely disappointed.

By this stage in the 1994 campaign, when the economy was faring worse than now, he had closed the gap on SPD challenger Rudolf Scharping.

For Kohl, it may be too late

"In 1994, the party booked [Mr Kohl] on talk shows like Hans Meiser, a German Donahue if you will. No leading politician had ever done this," said Bella Anda, the editor of Germany's best-selling newspaper Bild Zeitung. "But once you've done it, people get used to it."

This year Mr Kohl is not touring the talk show circuit, but Mr Schröder is. Mr Schröder's appearance as himself on a popular soap opera, Good Times Bad Times, created a huge amount of publicity and support.

Adding to Mr Kohl's difficulties in winning the political popularity contest are strategic concerns.

The CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has to face voters in a state election on September 13, two weeks before the national poll. Some fear the CSU, since their late leader Franz-Joseph Strauß a more conservative outfit than the CDU, could lose their outright majority in Bavaria for the first time.

The result? "Since the polls look shaky, they are shoring up an aggressive position on immigration to fight off the right-wing DVU," says Simon Green, a lecturer in European Studies at the University of Portsmouth. "That position is irritating the CDU and causing internal coalition splits."

The CSU also has been furious with the coalition government's third member, the small liberal Free Democrats, for opening up the question of Mr Kohl's successor.

Some in the FDP, hoping to distance themselves from Mr Kohl, have been hinting that the Chancellor should announce now that he intends to hand over to his more popular No 2, Wolfgang Schäuble, in a couple of years if he is re-elected.

Mr Schäuble added to the succession debate last week by suggesting in an interview that a handover midway through a fifth Kohl term was possible.

This unleashed a torrent of media speculation, forcing Mr Kohl to assure voters that if they elected him he would stay the course. "I always said clearly that I am running for a full term of office from 1998 to 2002," the chancellor told Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.

Whatever the case, the result is confusion for many.

"Kohl attacks his rival Gerhard Schröder by saying that when you vote for Schröder you don't know what you are voting for," said Süddeutsche Zeitung commentator Heribert Prantl.

"But it's worse with Kohl. When you vote for Kohl you don't even know who you're voting for," he said.