But despite the gloom, it is too soon to write off the German Chancellor, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
The German Chancellor swept into an Internet cafe in Berlin on Tuesday evening sporting a new haircut and his old fixed smile.
When Mr Gerhard Schröder made a move as if to leave, a handler reminded him to at least feign an interest in his personal website on the big screen behind him that he was supposed to unveil.
"As you all know, my wife Doris is a journalist," he told the waiting press horde. "Each day on the website she will contribute a daily commentary. Favourable commentary, I hope." It will take more than his wife to improve the tone of commentary towards Mr Schröder in the German press.
With just eight weeks until the general election, things have never looked so grim for the Chancellor. The economy is like a wet motor that refuses to start, the dole queues are not getting any shorter and no matter what opinion poll you look at, the conservatives are at least 5 per cent ahead.
Even newspapers more favourable to the Social Democrats have started to ask the same question: has Gerhard Schröder lost his touch? The strain began to show last week, when he appeared at a press conference to announce that he had fired his defence minister, Mr Rudolf Scharping.
At the end of his terse statement, Mr Schröder hesitated for a moment as if he had something else to say, his eyes gazing into the mid-distance. But then the diminutive leader drew himself to his full height and stomped off the stage. The moment passed in a split second, but for the first time in four years, Mr Schröder looked lost.
Everything has gone against him in the last six months, wearing down a politician who is used to winning. "Schröder had the unmistakeable mark of a winner in the 1998 election campaign, something people now deeply miss," commented Der Spiegel magazine this week.
"Look at Schröder now, his winning streak is behind him," said Mr Rainer Jahn, as he peered through a window of the Internet cafe at the Chancellor. "After four years what can he honestly say he's done for us?" A cursory glance at the government's end-of-term report card provides few answers.
Under Mr Schröder the German economy, the largest in the euro zone, grew by an average of just 1.5 per cent, the same as under the last Kohl administration. There are 150,000 fewer people out of work now than under Dr Helmut Kohl, but that is offset by a growing number of people on job schemes.
It will be difficult for Mr Schröder to remind voters of his reforms of the tax system and social politics that are impossible to show in a pie-chart. The reality is that the state of the economy will be the deciding issue when voters go to the polls on September 22nd.
Unluckily for Mr Schröder, the economy is the one area where voters have more trust in his rival, the Bavarian prime minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber.
The conservatives now have 40 per cent support, the Social Democrats just 34 per cent, an exact reversal of the last election when the conservatives lost power after 16 years. Now Mr Stoiber is confident he will be the first German politician to unseat a one-term chancellor at the ballot box.
"The SPD cannot win the election at this stage and the CDU can only lose it," said Mr Michael Spreng, a former tabloid editor turned Stoiber media handler.
Pollsters share that opinion. "There has never been a single government that managed to turn things around in the last 70 days," said Mr Klaus-Peter Schöppner, head of the Emnid Polling Institute.
The importance of the economy in this election caught Mr Schröder off guard. Even when the economy slumped into recession at the end of last year, he clung to a "silent hand" policy of non-intervention.
However panic set in earlier this year when Germany's leading economists revised their earlier forecasts and predicted that the first signs of an upswing would register long after election day.
The government assembled a commission to come up with proposals to reform the employment market and Mr Schröder is banking on its final report to give him a boost when it is published next month. It will need to be a convincing document, however, because few still believe his claim that Germany's stagnant employment market is the fault of a global recession.
"German unemployment has nothing to do with globalisation, it's home-made," said Mr Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor and SPD leader, last month.
Mr Schröder paid little attention to bystanders as he left the Internet cafe on Tuesday evening.
"After four years of Schröder, I feel we have a more tolerant and open society," said Mr Mikolaj Ciechanowicz (24), a student, "but people will be more influenced by black-and-white issues like unemployment. That will decide the election and that's a shame."
Despite the gloom, it is far too soon to write off Mr Schröder. The real election campaign has only just begun and with it Mr Schröder's best chance to press the flesh and transfer his own popularity onto the party.
After recent lacklustre performances, though, he knows he will have to muster up some of the old Schröder media magic on the campaign trail and in two upcoming television debates if he is to come out on top on election day.