When was the last time you heard of a presidential candidate taking a lengthy vacation in the Alps just weeks before an election? For German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is up for re-election next month, doing virtually nothing to campaign seems to be working in her favor.

Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic Union party, was elected the first female chancellor of Germany in 2005. Soon after, she was named the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes and eventually became the second-ever woman to chair the G8. Her approval ratings both in Germany and abroad have been sky-high and her country's recent ascent out of recession certainly can't be hurting her rep.

But the result of Ms. Merkel's infallibility is not a passionate re-election campaign backed by hoards of supporters. Instead, German voter apathy is at an all-time high and Merkel is on cruise control, revealing little about her plans for the future and refusing to engage in the hostile banter that usually encompasses a campaign trail. She even went so far as to say that she is "more or less in agreement" with the policies of her opponent, Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Why fix something if it's not broken? As time draws nearer to Election Day and Merkel sits back, her approval ratings continue to go up and the gap between she and her opponent grows larger: A recent poll shows 64 percent of Germans want the current chancellor to be re-elected.

Maybe it's Merkel -- or maybe it's a German thing. In a New York Times article covering voter apathy in Germany, one voter was quoted as saying that she found "a more reserved election campaign very agreeable." Germans, unlike Americans, do not take positively to aggressive and expensive campaign efforts.

It's also holiday season in Germany. "It just wouldn't make any sense for either of them to be bombarding voters with compaigning during the holiday season because it would only annoy Germans," said Matthias Jung, head of the Electoral Research Group polling institute.