Not Over Til It's Over
With a mere two-point lead and a busy week to go, a victory for Chancellor Schröder on Sunday is no sure thing yet
"The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, may just win the German election by running against America," snorts the New York Times. It's not an uncommon assertion in the US and UK press. You'll find the much the same in The Financial Times, The Economist, Slate and so on.
And you'll find it in the German press as well. What went wrong with the conservatives' campaign, asks Der Tagesspiegel. Led by Edmund Stoiber, the Christian Democrats (CDU) soared in the polls over Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) all summer long. But then when US President Bush started making noises about toppling Saddam Hussein, "Schröder's sentence, 'We're not going along' was immediately understood at every beer-fuelled roundtable."
In other words, Schröder's gone populist and that was that. If only politics were that simple. Granted, Schröder's unequivocal "Nein" to German participation in an invasion of Iraq is popular. "Germans are not anti-American," assures The Economist, and yet:
"The list of gripes is long: many Germans deplore Mr Bush's hostility to the International Criminal Court; his attitude to the environment; the death penalty; unfettered American support for Israel against the Palestinians; genetically modified foods; farm subsidies; the Americans' apparently growing unilateralism; and now its policy on Iraq."
Given that laundry list, wouldn't it be more than a bit irresponsible of a leader of any democracy not to draw the line when and where it most clearly begs to be drawn?
But just as claiming Schröder wrapped up next Sunday's election with his stand on Iraq is overly simplistic, the notion that it's all over is way premature. On average, polls show the SPD leading over the CDU by a mere two points. Panicking, Stoiber has begun to play the race card. The Independent sums up a speech in the Bundestag on Friday: "Unemployment, immigrants, terrorism: the sentences were separate, but the inference was crystal clear."
How will this shift in tactics play out? The way polls whiplash these days, a week can be a very long time.
Elsewhere
Michael Naumann, Schröder's Culture Minister before he left the cabinet to become editor of Die Zeit, has been keeping a rambling but not at all uninteresting diary at openDemocracy. It's a bit difficult to navigate, but the latest entry seems to be here.
The Audi man, Kate Connelly's profile of Schröder in the Observer.
Is it possible to humanize Hitler?. A Plastic debate. David Edelstein reviews Das Experiment in Slate. Also: A round-up of international coverage of the ongoing political chaos in Austria. The latest: Right-wing firebrand Jörg Haider now says he doesn't want to head up the Freedom Party anymore. Again. Whatever.