GERMANY: Modern Germany's most thrilling electoral tussle began in a welter of scandal that led to the sacking of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's defence minister, and lurched from drama to drama over more than two months.
Tension followed the campaign from beginning to end and did not let up as the nation went to the polls. The leader of the Free Democrats yesterday demanded that his chief lieutenant, Mr Jurgen Molleman, resign. Mr Mollemann's colleagues were infuriated by pamphlets he sent to homes in his home state reviving a dispute with a prominent German Jewish leader.
"The debate of the past week has done us massive damage," the party leader, Mr Guido Westerwelle, said.
The final days of the contest were also overshadowed by a bitter row with Washington over a report that one of Mr Schroder's ministers had compared President Bush's tactics over Iraq with those of Adolf Hitler.
Mr Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said at the weekend US-German relations had been "poisoned".
The minister, Ms Herta Daubler-Gmelin, yesterday denied a report by the mass circulation Bild Zeitung that she planned to resign after the polls closed. "No, of course not," she said after voting in the southern city of Tubingen. "These are just malicious rumours meant to create uncertainty among voters."
The chancellor, who started his campaign some seven points adrift in the polls, clawed his way back to a lead of up to three points, but then appeared to falter in the last week.
But at the start of last week, the Christian Democrat leader Edmund Stoiber fell back on scare tactics, linking immigration first to unemployment and then to terrorism. Further troubling relations with the US administration, a New York Times column quoted the former defence minister, Rudolf Scharping, as saying that Mr Bush wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein to please "a powerful - perhaps overly powerful - Jewish lobby." - (Guardian Service)