German election heats up

Germany’s national election campaigns are gearing up just three weeks before the EU’s largest country goes to the polls.

Centre-right opposition leader – and pollster’s favourite - Angela Merkel has stepped up her campaign in a bid to defeat Gerhard Schroeder’s ruling centre-left coalition.

At a party conference in Dortmund at the weekend, Merkel vowed to “win back the trust” of voters and criticised Schroeder’s inability to tackle unemployment in Germany.

“There are now five million people without a job in this country. Germany needs a government that says what it is going to do before an election, a government that keeps its promises and wins back voters' destroyed trust,” she said.

Merkel stressed that Christian Democrats would “tell voters before the election what it would do afterwards…and draw Germany together again by linking differences between east and west, rich and poor”. 

She also restated plans to keep Turkey out of the EU amid loud applause, but a new income tax policy, a blanket charge of 25 per cent for most income brackets, could still prove unpopular.

Meanwhile, despite trailing in opinion polls German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder remains confident, arguing that in the past, the electorate has decided very late in the day which way it would vote.

“I am counting on the last 14 days, that is the decisive time when voters make up their minds,” he said.

A poll carried out by the ZDF television station gives Merkel 43 per cent of the vote compared with 30 per cent for Schroeder.

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