GERMANY: The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, is hoping for a Social Democrats (SPD) victory in a state poll tomorrow to signal a reversal of his fortunes for next year's general election.
The re-election of the party's coalition with the Greens in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein would end a string of 13 electoral defeats last year.
Then, public anger at government reforms drove support for the SPD down to just over 20 per cent, and despondent party leaders wrote off tomorrow's poll as unwinnable.
Now opinion polls show the state government head-to-head with the opposition, prompting Mr Schröder to leave his sick-bed this week and go on the campaign trail in the north.
"We can't fight a flu and the opposition," he remarked at a rally with the SPD state leader, Ms Heide Simonis, the only woman state premier in German history.
The 61-year-old politician, known as the "mother of the state", is highly popular in Schleswig-Holstein, where she has governed since 1993 and in coalition with the Greens since 1996.
Like her popularity, however, the significance of tomorrow's poll extends far beyond state borders. Ms Simonis has described tomorrow's poll as the start of an "SPD triple jump".
"If the coalition wins in Schleswig-Holstein, that will give it momentum," said Prof Hans-Jörg Hennecke, political analyst at the University of Rostock.
That momentum could help the SPD-Greens return to government in May's election in North Rhine-Westphalia and in Berlin next year.
"The likelihood that I will remain Chancellor is a given," said a confident Mr Schröder.
Tomorrow's poll will be the first test of whether the Greens have lost support because of the growing scandal surrounding the Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer.
His ministry is accused of ignoring reports that new visa rules introduced five years ago opened German borders to human traffickers and prostitutes.
"I'm hard-boiled, but to be called a pimp in the Bundestag, that's an attempt to bring down someone personally," said an emotional Mr Fischer at a Green Party rally in the state capital, Kiel.
It is unlikely that the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) will repeat tomorrow its 9 per cent election success from Saxony last year.