GERMANY: Germany's Christian Democrat (CDU) leader, Angela Merkel, has begun a last push to win over undecided voters and stem slipping support ahead of next Sunday's general election.
Dr Merkel is fighting to regain her majority in opinion polls and yesterday she ruled out participating in a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) - what one leading CDU politician has called the "nightmare scenario".
"With certainty, a grand coalition would mean stagnation, and stagnation is not good for Germany," Dr Merkel said during a brief visit to her home town of Templin, 80km north of Berlin.
Her homecoming, complete with a welcome from her mother, Herlind Kasner, was planned weeks ago as a kind of final victory lap for the party leader.
Then the CDU was riding high in the polls and Gerhard Schröder was all but written off.
However, since he won a television debate a week ago, nearly two million previously undecided voters have fallen into the SPD camp, and Chancellor Schröder is in fight-back mode. He is hoping for another boost following a final television discussion tonight with Dr Merkel and other political leaders.
"The tide is turning," said Chancellor Schröder at the weekend, clearly enjoying the chance to rattle his opponent. "The dozers of yesterday cannot bring about tomorrow's new start," he added in a reference to Dr Merkel's eight years as a minister under Helmut Kohl.
There was a defensive tone to Dr Merkel's election speech in Templin yesterday when she admitted that the CDU had been defeated in 1998 because Chancellor Kohl shied away from serious economic reforms.
"I've sworn not to repeat that mistake," she said to loud cheers in a tent erected close to the Horse Watering Hole pub.
This morning, the CDU will launch a "100-hour fightback" - wheeling out top party brass to halt its slide in the polls by spreading uncertainty about the SPD's post-election intentions.
"If the SPD has the chance to continue ruling with the Greens and the heirs to East Germany's Communist Party, then they will," said Mr Roland Koch, a CDU state premier, referring to the Left Party. This electoral alliance of reformed communists and former SPD left-wingers has 8 per cent support and could turn out to be an election spoiler for all sides.
Mr Schröder's SPD has 34.5 per cent support in the most recent poll, a 3.5 per cent increase in a week, while the CDU has fallen 2 points to 40.5 per cent. Neither camp has a parliamentary majority.
Templin town officials hope a Chancellor Merkel will give an economic lift to a region where one in five people are unemployed. The mayor is already dreaming of a "Chancellor Merkel city tour" of the politician's birthplace, school, the 14th century city wall and the Karl Marx memorial, a remnant of its East German past. Other locals are less impressed with their most famous daughter. "Perhaps she will improve things, but I don't think politics can do much for this region," remarked one elderly man. "Only business can help, and there's no sign of that."