Edmund Stoiber is the man to beat in next month's German election, but thisweek Gerhard Schröder will try to start a comeback, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
If German voters went to the polls tomorrow, Edmund Stoiber would be the new chancellor of Germany by dinner time. The conservative challenger in next month's general election has turned around the fortunes of Germany's Christian Democrats (CDU) and has won a seven-point lead on the Social Democrats (SPD) with a simple tactic: voicing the fears and frustrations of German voters.
"Unemployment and the fear of unemployment are weighing on people," he told workers in Cologne this week. "Our country's competitiveness is too weak, and we're bottom of the table for growth - that's what bothers people."
Mr Stoiber was in Cologne, capital of North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany's industrial heartland, to win back the floating voters who turned on Helmut Kohl four years ago.
The Ruhr is home to one in five Germans and is traditionally a bastion of SPD support. Voters here gave Gerhard Schröder a quarter of the votes he needed to end the 16-year Kohl era in 1998.
But the country's economic downturn has been acutely felt here, and floating voters are up for grabs.
"Schröder simply hasn't done enough for us," said Mr Thomas Mies, a 33-year-old technician. "The figures for Bavaria are relatively good."
Edmund Stoiber's Bavaria is a high-technology as well as industrial giant with above-average salaries and unemployment half the national figure. That prosperity on a national level is an attractive prospect to all voters, especially in eastern states, where unemployment is running at 18 per cent, twice the national average.
The Bavarian prime minister has undergone a transformation in recent months: handlers have french-polished the wooden technocrat to a statesman-like sheen. His sharp, arch-conservative corners that made him popular in Bavaria have been sanded down for wider appeal.
Meanwhile the crisis-racked government is too preoccupied defending itself against the media to land any blows on Mr Stoiber.
And few journalists are asking if the new, improved Mr Stoiber has changed his line on some of the most emotive and important issues for Germans, such as immigration and EU enlargement.
Last December he told a party conference that after EU enlargement Bavaria alone would be flooded with 250,000 immigrants. Not so, according to the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW): it estimates that around 200,000 immigrants would arrive in all of Germany in the first two years, before dropping drastically.
Mr Stoiber has fought against plans to open Germany to foreign labour. With four million unemployed, the German employment market is saturated, he says. Yet there are over one million unfilled jobs in Germany, most in sectors less favoured by Germans, such as the food industry and manual labour.
Mr Stoiber is no stranger to anti-immigrant rhetoric either. Last year he complained in an interview that of the two million Turks living in Germany, over 70 per cent were unemployed and untrained.
He failed to say that his calculation included all Turkish babies, children and pensioners, not to mention the vast majority of Turkish women who work in the home.
Freed from any challenge from the SPD or the media, he has gone on the offensive. His first tactic is to fill Germans with shame, then hope.
"Germany does not belong in the last place for economic growth in Europe. I am convinced that with a great communal effort Germany can once again become the growth motor in Europe," he wrote this week in Bild, Germany's best-selling newspaper.
He is not underestimating the bruising Germany's pride has taken under Mr Schröder. It is humiliating enough for the one-time economic driving force in Europe to be now bringing up the rear. On top of that, the OECD revealed that schools in Germany, the land of poets and scholars, are producing some of the stupidest children in the developed world.
Mr Stoiber promises a soothing salve for Germany's wounded pride.
His concerned, paternal tones of late betray his second tactic: a promise to revitalise the economy without changing too much. With his "the three 40s" prosperity recipe he promises to cut taxes to a 40 per cent ceiling, fix social security payments at 40 per cent of salaries and cut public spending to 40 per cent of gross domestic product.
After weeks of plain-sailing campaigning, however, there are clouds on the horizon for Mr Stoiber. This week Mr Schröder will pull the last rabbit out of his Chancellor's hat and present radical proposals to get Germany back to work. Spun the right way, it could convince undecided voters to give him a second chance.
"Mr Schröder may be likeable but he has run the country into the ground," a CDU spokesman said. "Mr Stoiber, on the other hand, is a serious man for serious times."