The German chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, yesterday faced into the final fortnight of his campaign to win a fifth term in office claiming that voters were coming back to his party. Buoyed up by an impressive victory for his allies in the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria's state election on Sunday, Dr Kohl said the result showed that Germans do not want a "red-green" coalition between the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and the environmentalist Greens.
"This is a rejection of red-green. We will be using the next 14 days to get across the message that there is no majority in Germany for red-green," he said.
The final result in Bavaria's election gave the conservative CSU 52.9 per cent of the vote, a slight improvement on its share four years ago. The SPD saw its share fall by one per cent to 28.7 per cent and the Greens fell slightly to 5.7 per cent.
The SPD candidate for chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, insisted that the Bavarian election was fought exclusively on regional issues and that it would have no effect on the federal election.
Political analysts agree that the CSU owes much of its success to the popularity of Bavaria's Prime Minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber, who has pursued a spectacularly successful policy of attracting high-tech industry to the state. The SPD remains five points ahead of Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) in most opinion polls but, as support for smaller parties remains low, the larger parties may be forced into a reluctant alliance following the election.
The Greens warned yesterday of the danger of a grand coalition, claiming that their participation in government was the only guarantee that Mr Schroder would be a reforming chancellor.
The Greens look likely to poll more than the five per cent of votes needed to take seats in the Bundestag, even if they do not fare well enough to create a majority with the SPD. But the position of Dr Kohl's allies in the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) is more parlous and their vote in Bavaria collapsed to just 1.7 per cent.
Dr Kohl needs the FDP to regain power but, even if his junior partners scrape across the 5 per cent threshold, the chancellor's task in the next two weeks is a daunting one.
The chancellor is especially unpopular in the east of the country, where his party is trailing the SPD by 10 points. As western voters become more reluctant to bid Dr Kohl farewell, easterners remain angry and disappointed at the high level of unemployment they are enduring eight years after German unification.
Reuters adds: German media commentators said that the victory of Dr Helmut Kohl's allies in the Bavaria state election had boosted his confidence but could not be seen as a direct precedent for the federal vote. "This [Bavarian election] was styled as a test election. But be cautious: Bavaria is different to the rest of Germany," the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said in a commentary. "Only in two weeks time will we know if a two-stage rocket was ignited in Bavaria or not."
The mass circulation Bild newspaper was less cautious than some, depicting the result as a direct victory for Dr Kohl.
