Failed husband routine works a charm for cool Schroder

On the market squares of countless small towns across Germany, young conservatives have taken to sporting T-shirts mocking the…

On the market squares of countless small towns across Germany, young conservatives have taken to sporting T-shirts mocking the inconstancies and infidelities of Gerhard Schroder, the four times married social democrat who is bidding fair to be the country's next chancellor.

The T-shirt message is simple and direct, and yet surprising for a culture which, unlike in the United States or Britain, treats the private lives of its politicians discreetly and deferentially. Three women can't be wrong, reads the slogan on the Christian Democratic posters and T-shirts, insisting that Mr Schroder's three failed marriages prove he is an unreliable cad unfit to run Germany.

Younger, better dressed, more charming, and infinitely more telegenic than Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Mr Schroder, the spin doctors and campaign strategists calculate, is more appealing to the 52.5 per cent of German voters who are women. The failed husband message is a controversial attempt by the Kohl camp to cancel the challenger's perceived attractiveness to the female electorate. But the tactic does not seem to be working.

"A slogan like that has an impact on women who are voting Christian Democratic (CDU) anyway, but there is no evidence it will sway undecided women voters," said Horst Becker, of the Polis society for political and social research in Munich. "Schroder's four marriages are not an issue. The CDU is trying to make it an issue. But for women, who make up more than half the German electorate, marriage is not a big factor."

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"Kohl is used up," said Christina Sax, a Bavarian student who votes conservative but prefers Mr Schroder to Mr Kohl. "I don't like Schroder very much. But he wouldn't be a catastrophe. Better than Kohl."

In the eyes of housewife, Regina Roth (40), German women could not care less that Mr Schroder divorced his third wife, Hiltrud, and last year married Doris Koepf, a journalist almost 20 years his junior. Mrs Roth neither likes nor trusts Mr Schroder, but will vote for the Social Democrats (SPD) tomorrow week because, among other things, they have promised her an extra £12 a month child benefit. "I don't believe Schroder's promises, but the climate has got to change in this country and I just couldn't vote for the CDU."

Despite the CDU wooing of the women's vote through negative campaigning, there is no doubt that Mr Schroder is more popular than Mr Kohl among both sexes. An Infratest Dimap survey at the start of the month gave the challenger a 23-point lead over the chancellor among women voters. While 51 per cent of women said they would opt for Mr Schroder, 28 per cent preferred Mr Kohl, were the chancellor to be elected directly. And while 55 per cent had a positive opinion of Mr Schroder, 36 per cent were not impressed.

Although the two parties have substantially divergent records in promoting women to office, the differences are more of nuance and language than of policy. While the CDU programme speaks of "marriage" as the best basis for raising children, the SPD manifesto fails to mention the word and on the key issue of jobs and unemployment is more explicit in supporting working women and amending the tax system in favour of individual rather than family taxation.

With unemployment of more than 4,000,000, it is Germany's women, particularly in the depressed east, who are suffering disproportionately. One study this month found 1.5 million female jobs had been lost in the east since unification, made worse by the fact that 92 per cent of east German women were at work under the old communist regime.

The expectation that women should work is twice as marked in the east. Another survey found about half of Germans of both sexes in the west believed women should stay at home and raise families, while a quarter of east Germans of both sexes felt the same way.

As for voting patterns, leading pollsters and analysts say there is little divergence in the behaviour of the sexes.

"There is no specific female electoral behaviour," said Dieter Roth, of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen polling organisation. "Although men like Schroder more than women, the general rule is that age and education are the decisive factors affecting voting choices." One poll last week put male and female support for the SPD at roughly the same level of 43 and 42 per cent while 39 per cent of women backed the CDU, next to 35 per cent of men.

And more women than men vote for the environmentalist Greens, perhaps because they are unique in that their women MPs in the Bundestag or lower house in Bonn outnumber the males by three to two.

Of the 672 MPs in the Bonn parliament, 177 are women, just over 26 per cent. But while the Christian Democrats' caucus is 14 per cent female, more than one-third of SPD MPs are women and 43 per cent of MPs for the former east German communists or PDS are women.

When Mr Schroder won reelection in March as the Prime Minister of the northern state of Lower Saxony, he promptly sacked two women ministers from his cabinet and abolished the ministry for family affairs. Neither those moves nor his four marriages seem to have dented his popularity among Germany's 31.8 million women voters.