Germany goes to the polls for state election as Gerhard Schröder's economic reforms begin to bite, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
Two things stood out at a political rally held in Saxony last week by Germany's National Democratic Party (NPD): the number of young men present and the number of them with shaved heads, all listening to a harmless-sounding folk song: "German songs, German wine, German beer clean and pure, German people, proud and free, that this once again may be."
Music over, the NPD leader, Udo Voigt, reminds the crowd: "There was once another time when Germany had six million unemployed. And then a party came to power, and in three years unemployment was gone," he says, not mentioning that the same party, a decade later, led Germany to ruin.
For Voigt and his NPD supporters, the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) is the party that is leading Germany to ruin. "Fed up? Let's settle the score on Sunday" is the message on the party's election posters.
For decades, the NPD has been a fringe party with no parliamentary representation. That will change after tomorrow's state election in Saxony, where the NPD will take around 9 per cent of the vote, according to polls, and enter the state parliament for the first time since 1968.
It's a similar picture across the border in Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin. Here, the German People's Party (DVU), another far-right grouping, is expected to become an even stronger force in the state parliament in Potsdam.
With the government's economic reforms beginning to bite, Germany's far right is riding the wave of discontent from the bar backroom into parliamentary politics.
When thousands of Germans took to the streets in recent weeks to protest at the economic reforms, the NPD was marching alongside. The biggest marches were where the mood is darkest: in eastern Germany where one in five is without work, twice the national average, and where cuts to Germany's unemployment benefit next January will hit hardest.
Poor general understanding of the reforms has been a boon to the extremists, as is clear from their simplistic slogans of "German jobs for Germans first " and "Foreigners out".
A good showing for the NPD is not unprecedented: the party regularly polled 8 and 9 per cent in state elections in the late 1960s and almost entered the Bundestag in 1969. Political observers disagree over whether it could have long-term effects on German politics.
Some see the rise of the NPD in Saxony, as well as the reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Brandenburg, as a protest movement to release frustration. Right-wing parties have been elected to state parliaments 14 times since 1949 without long-term effects.
"Experience shows that the extreme right parties in parliament are hardly a danger because of their incompetent leaders," wrote Dr Eckhard Jesse, a political scientist and far-right expert at the University of Chemnitz in Die Welt newspaper. "However the continued worsening of the economic situation just gives the populists more ammunition."
That is the fear of Germany's political leaders: that far-right gains will scare off potential investors from eastern Germany, precisely where new investment is needed. The extreme right could be both a cause and beneficiary of a continued economic slump in the east.
"Everything associated with the brown slime hurts us, hurts Germany and hurts us in the eyes of foreign investors," the Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, said this week.
Tomorrow's elections are unlikely to see any drastic changes in the state parliaments in Dresden and Potsdam. But some observers say the change could be more long-term, as voters turn to smaller parties and the parties that voted them through the two houses of parliament, the SPD and CDU.
"The economic losers of globalisation are the ones who feel especially drawn to the extreme-right parties," said Dr Wolfgang Dressen, a neo-Nazi researcher at Düsseldorf Technical College.
Recent elections show that the drift to the right is not just confined to the east: in last month's state election in the western state of Saarland, the NPD captured 4 per cent of the vote, just shy of the 5 per cent hurdle for parliamentary representation.
The government agency charged with monitoring extremist groups has warned for years that the NPD is building up strong networks, particularly in eastern Germany. After its failed attempt to ban the party, tomorrow's election results may give the government the jolt it needs to face the reality of the extreme-right in Germany.
"This is not some party of old Nazis, like it was for generations," says Heribert Prantl, a columnist with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "The new extreme-right radicalism is a young, not an old, movement."