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German coalition signals re-election attempt in 2006

With Germany's economy sprouting the first tender shoots of recovery, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his coalition partner, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, signaled this week that they planned to run again as a team in 2006.

The news, which came in remarks by party officials to several German news organizations, appears to reflect Schroeder's confidence that his political fortunes are reviving along with the economy.

It also suggests that Fischer is willing to set aside, at least for now, dreams of becoming the first foreign minister of the EU under its new constitution. Fischer, perhaps Germany's most popular politician, was widely regarded as a leading candidate for that post.

But political analysts said Fischer's popularity also made him indispensable to Schroeder, whose Social Democratic Party lags behind the opposition Christian Democrats by a wide margin in opinion surveys.

Without the strong performance of Fischer's Green Party in parliamentary elections last September, Schroeder would not have clung to power. The "red-green" coalition marshaled just enough votes to turn back a challenge by the conservative leader of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber.

A spokesman for the chancellor said on Friday that Schroeder welcomed Fischer's decision.

"It shows that both men are willing to continue tackling the reform agenda," the official said.

Indeed, political analysts said the show of solidarity by the two leaders was aimed as much at their own parties as at the opposition. They are eager to maintain discipline within the coalition while they try to push through sweeping reforms of Germany's labor market and social programs.

"This is a way for them to say, `We don't only want to introduce reforms, we really want to see them through,'" said Reinhard Schlinkert, the chairman of Dimap, a polling concern in Bonn.

He said Germans remained skeptical that Schroeder's reform plans would jolt the country out of its economic torpor. But the chancellor has made headway in getting his party and the opposition to agree to cuts in Germany's generous, some say unsustainable, unemployment benefits.

This week a government commission proposed raising the retirement age to 67 from 65.

Schroeder also benefited from his decision to accelerate more than US$20 billion worth of tax cuts planned for 2005. Economists said the move helped resuscitate Germany's flagging consumer sentiment, though critics warned that it would widen the already yawning budget deficit.
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