Merkel blamed for poll result

2005-10-01 20:04

Dresden - Political parties stood by Saturday for the final round of Germany's national election, with muted criticism being heard of centre-right leader Angela Merkel from her own supporters.

Voting was to take place on Sunday in a single district of the eastern city of Dresden where ballots had to be reprinted after the death of a candidate and voters were unable to join the rest of the country in the September 18 poll.

The Greens were the last to hold a Dresden rally, with their co-leader Claudia Roth, saying on Saturday they planned to be a strong opposition.

Merkel, who told a final Christian Democratic Union (CDU) campaign rally on Friday that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's centre-left coalition had been voted out, has faced criticism over her failure to win an outright majority.

Her faction won only three seats more in the election than Schroeder's Social Democrats and both are now in talks on a grand coalition. The Sunday poll is seen in Germany as an opportunity to express second thoughts about last month's voting result.

The prospect of the Dresden by-election has disciplined her supporters, but a top official of the CDU's sister Christian Social Union, Guenther Beckstein, said on Saturday the entire election campaign should have put more emphasis on CDU/CSU sympathy for the poor.

Beckstein, who is Bavarian interior minister, told the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag that the CDU/CSU should have gone beyond campaigning on privatisation, deregulation and business competition and dissociated itself from those who regard big government as bad.

The leader of the CDU's labour wing, Karl-Josef Laumann, told the same paper that the party had put too much emphasis on pro-business policies. Neither man directly attacked Merkel, but the pro-business tack was a central plank of her policy platform.

- SAPA