Everybody needs a holiday now and again to recharge their batteries and gird themselves for the challenges awaiting them back home. Of course, some of us have a slightly more daunting to-do list than others.

In her first press conference after the summer break, Germany's Angela Merkel said on Monday that hiking around the Dolomites in northern Italy had helped clear her head and give her perspective on the coming tasks for her so-called grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats. While the chancellor exuded confidence and optimism, she'll certainly need both back in Berlin if she's to get her government back on track. Her approval ratings have sunk to abysmal levels recently and she's been almost completely shorn of her reformer credibility  gained during her first nine months in office.

Over the summer break, members of her own Christian Democratic party engaged in a fit of backbiting  while the boss was off hiking -- leading many pundits to wonder whether Merkel would come back from holiday and immediately reassert her authority with a firm statement. However, those hoping for stern leadership from an iron chancellor instead got Merkel the mediator. Rebellious backbenchers, disgruntled voters and growing criticism about the government's watered down reforms -- nothing seemed to bother her that much. Perhaps realizing she's in no place to dictate to anyone at the moment as her ratings in polls sag, it appeared as if she's more intent on simply keeping her political marriage of convenience afloat for the time being.

She even had words of praise for her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, whose package of unpopular reforms -- according to Merkel -- has helped Germany's economy turn the corner. Wishful thinking? German newspapers on Tuesday dissect the meaning of Merkel's post-holiday press conference.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung opines that there were flashes of the once determined reformer on display on Monday, but that words will not be enough to save her chancellorship or tackle Germany's most pressing problems. "It's not enough, as she is doing once again, to use banal platitudes," writes the paper. Merkel now has to back up her "demands for change with substance and offer ideas that engender trust" -- both within her own party and with those disappointed voters convinced that her reforms will simply lead to painful sacrifices.

The business daily Financial Times Deutschland writes that Merkel -- like so many Germans -- left for a pleasant holiday in Italy without resolving the most pressing problems at work: "The party is grumbling, the healthcare reform is in dire need of repair, the value-added tax increase is controversial and the voters are complaining." But the paper believes the chancellor is determined to keep her right-left coalition afloat -- if for no other reason than that neither her Christian Democrat conservatives nor the center-left Social Democrats are prepared to face early elections at the moment. "Neither party can be certain that breaking the coalition would have a happy end."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung devotes its lead editorial to Merkel's return from holiday, writing that she seemed refreshed by the "mountain air" and that she seemed prepared to "put on her boots for a pleasant hike" along the reform path. "However, it was still irritating how Mrs. Merkel came across as uncompromising in defending raiding the value-added tax and the healthcare fund," complains the paper, warning that given the constant corrections to Schröder's major welfare reform in recent years she should know that even "essentially correct reforms can go wrong if they're boxed through with brute force."