GERMANY: Beset by economic stagnation and serious electoral threats from the left and the right, time may be running out for Chancellor Schröder, Derek Scally reports from Berlin
In the Mel Brooks film The Producers, a Broadway impresario tries to get rich quick by staging a sure-fire flop musical, Springtime for Hitler, and defrauding his investors. His plan comes undone when the show becomes a sell-out success despite his best efforts to fail: his singing Hitler is a stoned flower child in knee-high suede boots with an audition song called Love Power.
"Peace Power" was the limp European-election slogan of Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), a doomed attempt to fashion success from certain failure.
Party bosses hoped to reawaken German opposition to the war in Iraq and, for the umpteenth time, remind voters how Chancellor Gerhard Schröder opposed what he called US-led "military misadventures".
Instead, the SPD experienced a misadventure of its own, capturing just a fifth of the vote, down from a third in the last European election. Meanwhile in state elections in Thuringia, the SPD polled a jaw-dropping 14 per cent, suffering the indignity of finishing in third place and a good 12 points behind the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reformed East German communists.
Over half of those who voted in the European elections admitted they had been primarily influenced by domestic issues, namely unhappiness with the economic and social reforms of the government.
The Chancellor has vowed to hold his reform course aboard the Agenda 2010 reform ship or go down with it, even after the elections showed that SPD voters are abandoning ship.
As one commentator put it, party traditionalists fear that, with his economic and social reforms, the Chancellor is taking an axe to the party's social democratic core values, while the floating voters who helped re-elect the SPD have decided that Mr Schröder doesn't even know how to hold an axe.
Doomed to cling to the reforms, the last hope of Mr Schröder and Mr Franz Münterfering, the SPD leader, is that voter opposition to the reforms stems from ignorance.
To that end, they have promised a fresh effort to explain why the reforms are necessary and will, eventually, be of benefit, even to the "small, poorer man" - precisely the people who are deserting the SPD. It's been cold comfort to SPD voters to hear that nearly all sitting governments were trounced in the European elections.
Even less comforting is Mr Schröder's motto since the elections: "I'm just a victim of time." No government is popular in the middle of reforms, he says, particularly in a time of economic stagnation.
But time is what this government needs more than anything: time for the economy to recover, time for the benefit of the reforms to be felt and time for all that to trickle down into the SPD column of the opinion polls.
The reality is, however, that time is running out: Mr Schröder's fate may be decided in upcoming elections in North Rhine Westphalia, home to one in five Germans and traditionally an SPD stronghold. Big losses in this autumn's local elections or in the state elections next May could be the end.
Yesterday, Mr Münterfering told the SPD rank-and-file that it was essential to hold the reform course but admitted the pounding at the polls called for consideration of a more "social" direction. Tellingly, however, he made no firm commitments other than promises to discuss left-wing pet projects.
Political observers say the coming months will see little fresh reform impetus and will instead be filled with discussion of projects which sound convincing but cost little, financially or politically.
Things could yet go right for Mr Schröder: a big event like the floods of two years ago or the Iraq war would give the Chancellor a stage for a show of strong, pragmatic leadership. The opposition Christian Democrats may be riding high in the polls around the 50 per cent mark, but analysts agree this support is built on frustration with the government rather than support for the conservatives.
Among the SPD rank-and-file, grumbling since the election defeats, some political commentators detect a change in the air. There is renewed talk of creating a left-wing splinter party lead by Oskar Lafontaine. The firebrand finance minister ousted by Mr Schröder has come in from the political cold.
"A new era has begun for the SPD. It is the era after Schröder," wrote one closely-watched columnist recently. It's a year since Chancellor Schröder launched his Agenda 2010 reforms under the banner "Courage for Change". Only the coming months, and the looming series of eminently loseable local and state elections, will show whether the SPD has the courage for change in its own ranks, starting with the heads at the top.