With an Audi A6 and a Volkswagen Golf in the garage, summer holidays in Greece and 10 days' skiing in Austria every winter, life could be worse for Wolfgang Struck, writes Ian Traynor.
Family snapshots line the living room of the comfortable house the former police officer, now civil servant, built 22 years ago for his wife and two children in Karlsdorf, a prosperous middle-class town of 8,000 in the wealthy south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
Mr Struck was born into a working-class family in nearby Karlsruhe in 1947, and is a typical beneficiary of Germany's first stable, rich and successful democracy. Modest, hardworking, and having enjoyed the upward social mobility of post-war Germany, Mr Struck and millions like him are the key factor in tomorrow's election.
Gerhard Schroder has dubbed the Strucks "Die Neue Mitte", the new centre, or the conservative, middle-class, middle-brow majority of small-town Germany who have never had it so good, but fear their bubble may soon burst.
In their campaign to unseat Helmut Kohl tomorrow, the Social Democrats are banking on capturing that centrist vote.
A police officer for 34 years before moving into personnel, Mr Struck has always voted for Mr Kohl's Christian Democrats. But not this time.
He voted for Mr Kohl in 1983, 1987, and 1990. But he got disillusioned with the CDU, and at the last election, in 1994, he split the two ballots every voter gets in Germany between the CDU and the SPD.
Tomorrow, he is giving both his votes to the Social Democrats. "It's a good life in the Neue Mitte in Germany," he says. For Mr Struck's father, a sheetmetal worker, things were different. He was a PoW until 1946 and lost two children in the war.
Even so, Wolfgang Struck fears for his own children - Gabi, his graduate daughter aged 29, and student son, Jurgen, aged 21.
"Unemployment is the main issue in this election. I'm OK, I'll be retiring on a good pension at 60," he says.
"There is hardly any difference between the two big parties. But there's four million unemployed and we all know it's really five million. It's Kohl's bad luck that he's in power."
Mr Struck's French wife, Marianne, works part-time as a translator and between them they bring home around $6,500 (£4,400) a month. They have seven weeks' holiday a year.
In nine years, when he retires, he will have a pension of about £1,500 a month. "We've got the right system here in Germany, pensions and welfare and health care. It might be the best in the world and I don't mind paying for it.
"But fewer and fewer are financing it and we can't go on like this.
"Kohl is the chancellor of unification and the big `Mr Europe', and that's fine. But he's doing nothing about our real problems in this country and that's what I expect Schroder to concentrate on."