With a shake-up in Germany's political spectrum looming, a senior Social Democrat was conciliatory Saturday towards Oskar Lafontaine, the likely kingmaker in the embattled western state of Saarland, according to dpa. On Sunday, Saarland and two other states are to elect new legislatures. On September 27, Germany holds a general election. The campaigns have been marked by a flight of voters from the Social Democrats (SPD) to the Left Party. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose candidacy to oust Chancellor Angela Merkel appears doomed by the slump in Social Democratic support, reached out to Left Party co-leader Lafontaine in a news interview. The newspaper Bild am Sonntag asked Steinmeier if it was true the Social Democrats sought a coalition with the former communists of the Left in Saarland, a state on the French border where Lafontaine was once SPD premier. "Despite my criticism of Oskar Lafontaine, he definitely was not to blame for the Berlin Wall," answered Steinmeier, who has said he refuses links with the Left at federal level, but does not oppose them at state level. Lafontaine, 65, resigned his SPD offices in 1999 and allied with the former communists in 2005. "At federal level, we will have no governmental cooperation with the Left Party for the entire life of the next parliament. No ifs and buts. You can count on that," Steinmeier said. Merkel pitched for votes Saturday in Saxony state where her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is seen as likely to win with help from the SPD or the pro-business Free Democrats in Sunday's legislative poll. The existing CDU majorities in Saarland and Thuringia are forecast to give way to Left-SPD-Green coalitions. Axel Misch, a University of Trier political scientist, said the closeness of the Saarland race would prompt a higher voter turnout than the 55.5 per cent five years ago. "Lafontaine attracts protest voters who usually don't bother," Misch told the German Press Agency dpa. Misch forecast a stormy time for the SPD in the run-up to the general election if it agrees to link up with Lafontaine, who is seeking a comeback to office in Saarland as Left leader. "Getting into bed with the state organization of a radical populist like Lafontaine, but keeping up an insistence that they won't form that alliance federally destabilizes the SPD strategy," he said. Steinmeier predicted to Bild am Sonntag that the state polls would turn around his campaign. "I'm expecting the first positive results from the state elections," he said. Merkel, whose national authority has been only slightly dented by the recession and rising unemployment, meanwhile cautioned about reading too much into any swing against the CDU in Saarland and the central state of Thuringia. "These are not tests for the general election," she told the newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine. Another political scientist, Ulrich Eith of the University of Freiburg, said Merkel's strategy of soft campaigning contained a risk for the CDU. Many political analysts have said the federal campaign has been so devoid of controversy that it verges on dull. "A feel-good campaign brings the CDU in serious danger of not mobilizing enough of their own supporters," Eith said. But he dismissed the chances of the SPD of catching up. SPD support is running at 23 per cent to the CDU's 38. "The SPD doesn't have any talented campaigner this time round like Gerhard Schroeder," he said, referring to the charismatic and pugnacious SPD chancellor who led Germany from 1998 to 2005.
