Schroeder to get verdict on early poll request
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-07-21 09:30

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will know within 48 hours whether he can go ahead with a political gamble to fight early national elections in September against conservative challenger Angela Merkel.

President Horst Koehler has until Friday to decide on the election request by Schroeder, who has suffered a string of regional poll defeats at the hands of voters disillusioned with his economic reforms and an unemployment rate above 10 percent.

Schroeder deliberately lost a confidence vote in parliament three weeks ago to open the door to early polls, clearly hoping that in the heat of election debate he can thwart Merkel's ambition of becoming Germany's first woman chancellor.

French Interior Minister and UMP party President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) poses with German CDU President Angela Merkel following a press conference at UMP Presidential party headquarters in Paris, July 19, 2005. [Reuters]

But Schroeder, whose four-year term runs out in September 2006, is bidding for a fresh mandate for his economic reforms against a backdrop of opinion polls that put his Social Democrats (SPD) a hefty 15 to 19 percentage points behind Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).

Schroeder, however, would face an uphill battle if he had to soldier on with the CDU now in firm control of the upper house of parliament and his SPD-Greens coalition majority in the lower house looking fragile due to rebellion over his reforms.

All parties, 75 percent of voters and the financial markets want early polls in hopes of resolving the woes of Europe's largest economy. Germany's DAX index of leading shares has risen 10 percent in the past two months as investors bet on a CDU win.

NO EASY ELECTION ROUTE

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder thumbs up during a party meeting of the Social Democratic Party of German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate in Mainz, central Germany, Saturday, July 16, 2005. [AP]

But Germany's post-war constitution provides no easy route to early polls, a reaction to the political instability that helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. The German Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s had 12 chancellors.

Koehler is widely expected to endorse early elections for the good of the country, though some legal experts question the validity of such a move and one parliamentarian from Schroeder's coalition plans a constitutional court challenge.

"It is outrageous how all the parties are behaving as if the election were already a done deal," Wolf-Ruediger Schenke, lawyer for Greens legislator Werner Schulz, told Thursday's Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

The constitutional court would most likely rule within two or three weeks, meaning definitive confirmation of the early vote could be delayed until mid-August, just one month before the presumed Sept. 18 election date.

Two years ago, Schroeder unveiled an ambitious package of labor market reforms called "Agenda 2010" that were hailed as the most far-reaching overhaul of Germany's welfare state since World War II.

But Germans have grown fed up with the pain of the welfare cuts and waiting for the measures to boost economic growth and create jobs. German unemployment hit a post-war record of more than 5 million at the start of the year.

Merkel, from the former East Germany, proposes market- friendly reforms to spur growth and cut the cost of employing workers but her CDU has also set out policies that are likely to hurt the poor, such as an increase in value added tax (VAT).

Schroeder's SPD has made clear he would remain in office until the end of his term if Koehler declined to dissolve parliament and call early elections.

But that would virtually ensure another year of stagnation and probably push back the implementation of much-needed economic reforms, a delay that Koehler himself said Germany could not afford when he was sworn in a year ago.

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