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Defeat in the air as Germany's Schroeder rallies troops
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats will struggle to put on a brave face at their party congress Wednesday ahead of a general election they are almost certain to lose, AFP reported. Four days after Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats held what was widely viewed as an only slightly premature victory party in the western city of Dortmund, the Social Democrats (SPD) will gather in Berlin for a strategy meeting and pep rally ahead of the September 18 poll. "We are confident that we will be able to win people over with Gerhard Schroeder at the helm," SPD leader Franz Muentefering said Tuesday, looking to undecided voters who are said to make up between one-third and one-half of the electorate.
But there is the distinct whiff of impending defeat in the air. Barring a major upset in the next 18 days, polls unanimously show that Merkel will end Schroeder's seven years in power and become Germany's first female leader. Schroeder will try to rally the 500 delegates at the congress before the party issues a "call to vote" stressing their support of "politics of social justice" and attacking Merkel's "politics of social coldness". A copy of the draft manifesto identifies the more than 11-percent jobless rate as the country's biggest challenge, a tacit admission that Schroeder has broken his repeated pledges to get Germans back to work. Delegates will also sign off on a passage blasting Merkel's plans to hike the value-added tax by two points to 18 percent as a "program for recession". It dismisses as unfair the conservatives' aim to tax bonuses for working nights and weekends as well as cut subsidies for commuters in return for lowering the top tax rate. The manifesto accuses the Christian Democrats of seeking to cut pensions while the SPD says it aims to raise them as soon as economically possible, and charges the opposition with planning to introduce university tuition fees while the SPD rejects such proposals. It underscores its pledge to continue with Germany's phase-out of nuclear power, while the conservatives aim to maintain the nuclear power plants. And on foreign policy, it recalls Schroeder's vehement "no" to the US-led Iraq war as an example of the SPD's fight for peaceful conflict resolution while stressing the government's backing for Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Merkel sat on the fence on the invasion of Baghdad and has called for a "privileged partnership" with the EU for Turkey that stops well short of membership. A poll by the independent research institute Forsa published Monday had the SPD far behind the conservatives, with just 30 percent versus 43 percent for Merkel's Christian Union alliance. The Greens, junior partner in the ruling coalition, tallied seven percent while Merkel's preferred coalition ally, the liberal Free Democrats, garnered eight percent. And a new alliance of SPD dissidents and ex-communists called the Left Party posted eight percent.
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