Pressure? What Pressure?

That was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s message during a 90-minute grilling in Berlin by journalists at her last major news conference before the Sept. 27 election. Even though opinion polls show a narrowing in her re-election campaign and amid a growing nervousness in her conservative party, Merkel was a picture of tranquillity.

Although some of her conservative party allies are pushing for her to raise the volume and intensity of what has been an exceedingly cautious campaign, Merkel made it abundantly clear that she is not at all worried. Perhaps it was all a good bit of acting. But she answered even the most surly of questions from the pack of 100 journalists with a nationwide TV audience watching with smiles and jokes along with the usual assortment of evasive answers.

Like she has so often in the last four years, Merkel managed to find a shimmer of optimism in just about every query hurled her way. She turned each question about opinion polls showing the lead of her preferred centre-right alliance narrowing upside down by pointing out the centre-right still has a lead.

“The opinion polls are quite encouraging for us,” Merkel said even though the centre-right’s lead over a trio of left-leaning parties has shrunk to just two points in two polls and disappeared into a dead heat in a third. Two weeks ago, the centre-right had a six- to eight-point lead in those same polls over the Social Democrats, Greens and Left party. Four years ago, Merkel’s centre-right alliance also had a big lead before the election that evaporated on election day. The conservatives are particularly nervous after having seen their support plunge in the final days of the last two campaigns in 2002 and 2005.

Merkel also skated over questions about her shaky performance in a TV debate on Sunday against her rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her decision to go on a long summer vacation last month rather than campaign and her trip to Pittsburgh late next week just before the vote to attend a G20 summit.

“I treated myself to a two-week holiday because I felt it was appropriate and important – so that I could be happy and available right up to the end of the election campaign,” she said at one point. “I actually was quite satisfied with my performance in the TV debate,” Merkel said, disagreeing with the view of even many in her party that Steinmeier got the upper hand because she took such a cautious approach.

“It’s pretty much always the case that there is certain unrest and tension in a party as the election nears,” she said, adding a somewhat ominous warning to those in her party who are causing a commotion: “I’m going keeping a close eye on what everyone’s been saying.“

PHOTO: Angela Merkel smiles during a news conference in Berlin. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has succeeded – by the skin of his teeth — in getting Britain’s House of Commons to approve new police counter-terrorism powers that were condemned by civil liberties groups, a former prime minister, a U.N. human rights investigator and several dozen of Brown’s own Labour MPs. The Guardian newspaper writes about ‘Liberty, security and an anxiety over lost rights’.

And even the government admits the power to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before charging or releasing them has never been needed until now: it wants it as an insurance policy against future attacks or plots in which the police may need more than the 28 days they now have in order to investigate tangled international links, false identities and masses of encrypted computer files.

So what’s going on? The bald figures suggest Britain is way out of step with other democracies. The six weeks allowed under the bill for initial questioning of terrorism suspects compares with one day in Canada, two in the United States, Germany, South Africa and New Zealand, five in Spain and 12 in Australia.

But the bald figures don’t tell the whole story. Police in most European countries, for example, hand cases over to a judge or prosecutor after the first few days and the suspect may wait in jail for months or years while the investigation proceeds. Britain can also plausibly argue, on the basis of the number of plots intercepted in the past few years, that it is more threatened than most countries by al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Opinion polls suggest the public backs Brown on this issue, although his overall popularity rating is dire. And with the House of Lords likely to oppose the bill and send it back for re-consideration by the lower chamber, Brown is far from being out of the woods.

Expect more debate in coming months on possible alternative means of tackling terrorism — particularly on whether to let British police, like their counterparts nearly everywhere else, use evidence from tapping suspects’ phones as ammunition to prosecute them in court.

Despite the embarrassment caused this week when a senior security official left top-secret intelligence documents on a train, the British authorities have a strong record in countering terrorism. Since 2004 the country has seen at least one major plot each year, and many smaller ones. Only one succeeded: the July 2005 London suicide attacks that killed 52 people. So far, 2008 has been a quieter year — but the emergence of any major new threat could once again shift the goalposts in the security debate.