LONDON, 29 July — Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's already waning chances of winning Germany's general election were thrown into further doubt yesterday by opinion pollsters who claimed he had virtually no hope of victory in the contest this autumn.
In a highly unusual move, the heads of the Germany's three main opinion poll organizations said that rising unemployment and a catalogue of blunders by his coalition of Social Democrats and Greens meant that Schroeder had lost his chance of beating his conservative rival Edmund Stoiber.
"The election has already been decided," Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, head of Germany's influential Allensbach poll organization told Bild Zeitung newspaper, "There is a mood swing away from Schroeder in favor of Edmund Stoiber," she added.
Her view was echoed by Peter Schoeppner, head of the Emnid poll group: "I cannot see how Schroeder can turn it around. The feeling among voters is simply that the Red-Green coalition is simply not up to it, " he said. Manfred Guellner, the head of the Forsa poll organization added: "It is getting more difficult for the Social Democrats by the day." Their comments followed publication of new poll results yesterday which suggested that the Chancellor had lost his crucial lead in the personal popularity stakes to Stoiber, the Bavarian conservative Chancellor candidate.
Schroeder had so far been able to claim that even if the conservative Christian Democrats were ahead of his Social Democrats on policy, he was still a more popular candidate than his rival.
However, the Emnid poll group yesterday ranked Schroeder two percentage points behind Stoiber for the first time and claimed that voters now rated the Chancellor as only the seventh most popular politician in Germany. The poll's findings represent a serious setback for Schroeder who only last week admitted that his personal popularity was one of the few trump cards he had left.
Germany's 4 million unemployment rate, which experts yesterday predicted was unlikely to fall when June's figures are released next week, is the chief reason for the Chancellor's flagging election chances. Voters have consistently viewed Stoiber as the better economic manager.
However, the Schroder government's popularity has been further undermined through the belated sacking ten days ago of Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping over sleaze allegations and the controversial dismissal of Ron Sommer, the head of the loss-making and partially government owned Deutsche Telekom.
Schroeder was accused of acting too late over Scharping and of having plotted against Sommer to win the votes of thousands of Deutsche Telekom shareholders who lost out as the company's shares nosedived.
The Chancellor's woes were compounded at the weekend by the resignation of a senior Greens party MP over new sleaze allegations. Cem Oedemir, the Green domestic affairs spokesman and the only Turkish-born MP in Germany gave up his Bundestag seat after admitting that he had received the equivalent of (pounds sterling) 29,000 in loans from the same public relations company involved in the sleaze allegations surrounding Scharping.
Stoiber, however, suffered a setback at the weekend when he accidentally hit a woman full in the face with a football at an election rally.
Stoiber was demonstrating his soccer skills in the western town of Koetzing on Saturday when he shot wide of goal and into the crowd where it hit a woman directly in the face. (The Independent)
