BERLIN • Hands resting in front of the stomach, thumbs and fingertips touching to form a diamond shape - Dr Angela Merkel's "rhombus" hand gesture has been her most recognisable trademark.
The gesture has its own Wikipedia page, its own emoticon, and the long-time German leader has even been immortalised adopting the pose at London's famous Madame Tussauds waxworks museum.
But the "Merkel-Raute", as it is known in German, became her signature largely by accident, born from a camera-shy Dr Merkel being unsure how to pose during a photo shoot for Stern magazine in 2002.
Then head of the Christian Democrats (CDU), and still three years away from being elected as her country's chancellor for the first time, Dr Merkel "didn't know what to do with her hands", photographer Claudia Kempf later recalled.
"She let them hang down next to her, which made her look a bit exposed, or she joined them together. I said to her, 'You look too much like a pastor's daughter'," Ms Kempf told the Rheinische Post newspaper in 2009.
A few months before the German elections in 2013, Dr Merkel gave her own explanation of how the gesture had come about. "It's about the question of where to put your arms," said the physicist by training, adding that the rhombus also showed "a certain love of symmetry".
At the time of that interview, Dr Merkel was campaigning for a third term in office. The whole Parliament comes up for renewal in German federal elections, but her CDU party had decided on a very personalised campaign. A billboard 70m wide by 20m tall was erected near Berlin's central station featuring a giant image of the Merkel rhombus, made up of more than 2,000 photographs of hands, with the slogan "Germany's future in good hands".
The rival Social Democrats slammed what they called an "empty personality cult" around Dr Merkel, while the Greens lamented: "If this is politics, we have fallen very low." But the woman affectionately nicknamed "Mutti" or mummy won the election by a wide margin a few weeks later, with the Merkel rhombus becoming "probably one of the most recognisable hand gestures in the world", according to Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The hand gesture has also been likened to a bridge, a protective roof, and even a sign made between members of the alleged Illuminati cult to identify themselves.
"I believe the Merkel rhombus was initially adopted unconsciously," said Dr Jochen Hoerisch, a communications specialist at the University of Mannheim. "But once it had been noticed by the public, it was then consciously used by the chancellor as a brand."
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
