Germany's Green party, riding high in national opinion polls after winning control of one of the country's richest states in March, is setting its sights on one of the poorest -- the capital Berlin, Reuters reported. Renate Kuenast, a former minister and parliamentary floor leader, launched her campaign to oust popular mayor Klaus Wowereit on Wednesday by attacking his record on unemployment and education ahead of the regional election in September. Berlin -- now a low-cost haven for students, artists and tourists, but unable to attract or hold big businesses like its rivals Munich or Hamburg -- has struggled with above-average unemployment and debt since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. "We've got to create more economic activity and well-paid jobs," Kuenast told reporters at the start of the "hot phase" of the campaign for one of Germany's 16 states. "That's indeed our enormous shortcoming -- we're the capital of poor people." In contrast to Social Democratic (SPD) mayor Wowereit, who has pushed his self-coined "poor, but sexy" image of the capital on the international stage, Kuenast said her campaign will put a focus on local issues she says Wowereit has neglected. "We're going to worry about people's everyday issues," she said. "We're going to tackle and go where the problems are because there are plenty of those," she added, referring to the city's jobless rate of around 13 percent -- double the national level. The SPD has ruled Berlin with the Left party for the last 10 years but the Greens have at times led the SPD in polls in the city-state. Currently the SPD currently has a 29 percent to 24 percent lead over the Greens. The two could end up in a SPD-Greens coalition with either the SPD or Greens on top -- like in Baden-Wuerttemberg where the Greens now lead a Greens-SPD coalition for the first time after a state election there in March. Kuenast also rapped the mayor for pushing Berlin as a possible candidate for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games despite not having the support of Germany's major athletics associations. Despite riding a wave of popular Greens sentiment after Chancellor Angela Merkel's nuclear energy U-turn this spring, Kuenast's campaign has yet to hit full stride. -- SPA
