BERLIN, 13 September 2005 — Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder squared off yesterday with his challengers in their last debate before Germany’s election as a new poll showed his Social Democrats making up more ground.
The ARD television debate pitted Schroeder and his Greens party ally, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, against conservative Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel and Edmund Stoiber, the head of her party’s Bavaria-only sister group, the Christian Social Union.
Guido Westerwelle, the head of the pro-business Free Democrats, and Gregor Gysi, co-leader of the new Left Party, completed the slate.
ARD allowed reporters to watch the recording of the debate in a Berlin hotel yesterday morning on condition they kept what was said under wraps until its broadcast in the evening.
Merkel hopes to form a center-right coalition with the Free Democrats after Sunday’s parliamentary election, but polls over the past week have shown them falling just short of a majority of the votes.
Meanwhile, the Social Democrats have clawed back support after a head-to-head televised debate with Merkel Sept. 4, in which most observers said the chancellor was the better performer.
A survey released yesterday by the Forsa polling agency and carried out last week put support for Schroeder’s party at 35 percent - up one percentage point from a poll performed last Monday and Tuesday, immediately after the debate.
The conservatives were unchanged at 42 percent, with the Free Democrats also static at 6 percent.
Schroeder’s current allies, the Greens, were unchanged at 7 percent, while the survey found that support for the Left Party dropped by one point to 7 percent. The new party is a combination of ex-communists and former Social Democrats angered by Schroeder’s efforts to reform the welfare state.
Forsa, which surveyed 2,504 people, gave a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
With neither the current coalition nor Merkel’s preferred combination now holding a majority less than a week before Sunday’s vote, speculation is rising that Merkel will have to turn to Schroeder’s party to form a “grand coalition.”
