GERMANY: Opinion poll discrepancies have left German political scientists confused, writes Derek Scally, from Berlin.
Germany's political parties have accused each other of using polling companies to manipulating opinion poll results and next month's election outcome.
The accusations began two weeks ago when the election was considered a walkover.
Mr Edmund Stoiber, the governor of Bavaria, had an unassailable lead in all the opinion polls and was sure to lead the conservatives back into power after just one term in opposition.
Then the flood waters appeared to wash the Social Democrat-led government back up the popularity scale.
Large discrepancies, however, have opened up between the different opinion polling companies and the Social Democrats (SPD) feel hard done by.
According to the Forsa Institute in Berlin, the SPD has 38 per cent popular support, just 2 per cent behind the Christian Democrats (CDU). Yet the Institute for Opinion Research, also known as Allensbach, gives the SPD just 32.8 per cent. The discrepancy of 5.2 per cent is not explained by error rates, says the SPD, but by political bias.
The Institute for Opinion Research was founded in Allensbach, near Lake Constance, by Ms Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (85), an academic best known for her "spiral of silence" theory about the growth and spread of public opinion.
The institute's bi-monthly political opinion poll is highly influential but among the ever-fluctuating political fortunes there is one constant - the consistently miserable poll ratings for the SPD.
"The election has already been decided. There is a swing away from Mr Schröder in favour of Mr Edmund Stoiber," said Ms Noelle-Neumann, dubbed by one prominent SPD member "the poison-mixer from Lake Constance".
Small wonder that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder prefers to go elsewhere for advice.
He listens to Mr Manfred Güllner, head of the Forsa Institute and an SPD member for 38 years. Forsa was the first polling institute to record the miraculous recovery of the SPD in the wake of the flooding in eastern Germany, much to the disgust of the conservatives.
"The opinion poll results of Forsa do not reflect reality; no wonder considering Forsa received one-third of all government polling contracts in the past year, earning over €664,000," said Mr Thomas Goppel, general secretary of Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party of the CDU.
He failed to mention that Ms Noelle-Neumann, as head of Allensbach, served for decades as the CDU's public communication adviser and held monthly meetings with Dr Helmut Kohl to discuss her institute's latest opinion poll findings.
New opinion polls yesterday from Germany's three other polling institutes all gave the SPD a similar popularity rating of between 38 and 39 per cent. Only Allensbach and the conservatives still believe the SPD has 32 per cent support.
The discrepancy has left German political scientists scratching their heads. Many believe the problem centres not just on alleged political bias but on the number of undecided voters in Germany.
One in five voters has yet to make up their mind and all polling institutes have their way of classifying this voting block.
Allensbach divides up the undecideds into those who have yet to fix on a party and those who are unlikely to vote at all next month. Forsa declines to discuss its system, but observers say it tends to favour the SPD.
"Many potential SPD voters are insecure. But according to our current analysis around 40 per cent of those who voted SPD in 1998 will do so again this year," said Mr Manfred Güllner, of Forsa, explaining the SPD's impressive showing in his company's recent polls.
He says Allensbach's polls are "manipulative in character" because of the time lapse, often as much as a week, before the data is published.
Ms Renate Köcher, head of Allensbach, defends the accuracy of the polls which are based on hour-long, face-to-face interviews.
"The media interest in quickly-available information is often in direct conflict with our intensive analysis," she said.
The SPD is having none of it. Last week, the party chairman, Mr Franz Münterfering, accused Germany's largest selling newspaper, Bild, of printing a week-old Allensbach opinion poll as part of a "campaign" against the government.
"There are three newer surveys with better figures for the SPD. Bild is suitable as wrapping paper but not for information," he said.
There have never been so many opinion polls in the run-up to a general election in Germany.
Neither has there ever been so little difference between the parties as the SPD and CDU fight it out for votes in the middle ground.
If nothing else, both parties now know the importance of having a sympathetic polling company on-side.
Three weeks before election day, the old cliché has come back into play: politicians only believe the statistics they've faked themselves.