When the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, climbed onto a makeshift platform in Magdeburg's market square this week, he was confronted by an audience almost equally divided between supporters and opponents. As soon as he started to speak, the whistling, cat-calls and shouts of "Kohl must go" rose to a crescendo and the protesters maintained a steady, screaming pitch throughout his hour-long speech.
With unemployment at almost twice the national level, soaring crime statistics and a growing problem of right-wing violence, the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt has little to be pleased about. But when the state's voters go to the polls on Sunday, they are expected to reward the Social Democrat-led government with four more years in office.
Some opinion polls even predict an outright majority for the Social Democrats (SPD), while Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) will be lucky to beat the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) into third place.
Saxony Anhalt's SPD Prime Minister, Mr Reinhard Hoeppner, is convinced that Sunday's result will have a significance far beyond the boundaries of his impoverished state and could determine the outcome of September's federal election.
"What happens in Saxony-Anhalt will profoundly influence the decision in the autumn. If the SPD achieves a clear majority, Kohl is finished," he said.
Dr Kohl shows no sign of giving up the fight but, as he took his audience on a journey through the history of the 20th century and outlined his vision of a united Europe, many of the party faithful looked bored. It was only when he declared that foreigners who break German law should "disappear" that the crowd became enthusiastic.
It took only 30 minutes of carpet bombing to destroy the centre of Magdeburg but it was 40 years of communist rule that turned the city into the bleak, concrete wasteland it is today. The city is a fitting capital for a state with the most badly polluted land and water in Germany, where young adults are still receiving medical treatment for lung damage caused in childhood by the filthy fumes of East Germany's chemical industry.
The PDS is the political voice for many of those who feel left behind by reunification, especially the 23 per cent of the workforce without a job.
Combining nostalgia for the communist era, calls for greater equality and practical help in local political clinics, the party commands 18 per cent of the vote in the state.
The governing coalition of Social Democrats and Greens has depended on PDS votes for the past four years, an arrangement condemned by Dr Kohl as giving credibility to left-wing extremists.
But it is another protest party that is causing most concern during this election - the far-right Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), or German People's Party, which is expected to win the five per cent of the vote needed to enter the state parliament.
Unlike the PDS, the DVU has no organisation on the ground in Saxony-Anhalt. But it has something more effective - an almost unlimited campaign budget. The party has already spent an estimated DM3 million on the campaign - more than the CDU and the SPD together.
Funded by a millionaire publisher, Mr Gerhard Frey, the party has sent three times as much campaign material to each household in the state as any other party. Its posters calling for the deportation of "criminal foreigners" are everywhere in Magdeburg - but always at the very top of lamp-posts where opponents cannot tear them down.
