German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on Monday gave a confident performance before a parliamentary committee investigating a visa scandal, accusing his critics of "propaganda."
Fischer, whose testimony was screened live on German television, admitted making mistakes after applicants from the former Soviet Union were allowed into Germany on dubious visas.
"I should have been informed earlier and reacted earlier," he said.
But he denied that new visa regulations introduced in 2000 had let in smugglers and prostitutes. And he angrily attacked one rightwing member of parliament (MP) who had branded him a "pimp."
"Stop your scandalization. You can criticize me. You can say, Fischer did that well or badly, or very badly. But does this give you the right to call me a pimp? ... The goal is to get rid of me and because there is not enough [evidence] you are using this scandal to get votes," Fischer said.
The scandal broke earlier this year when it emerged that thousands of applicants, most of them from Ukraine, had been wrongly allowed into Germany. Many of the applications, it was alleged, then disappeared.
Germany's opposition Christian Democrats have demanded the foreign minister's resignation.
A stream of embarrassing documents, meanwhile, suggested he had known about the problem at the German embassy in Kiev but had failed to act.
Giving evidence on Monday, however, Fischer claimed that Germany's opposition had exaggerated what happened.
"Let's have a look at the accusation -- firstly, that we opened the doors to criminals," Fischer told MPs. "Crime statistics don't support that. The theory that security was endangered, that the country was flooded with criminals, is simply a propaganda theory of the opposition."
He also said that his visa policy was virtually identical to that of his conservative predecessors.
"I stand for a liberal Germany open to the world, and the politics that follows from that," he said.
Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who governs in coalition with Fischer's Green party, has already said there is no question of his foreign minister resigning.
But Fischer's eagerly awaited testimony comes at a troubling time for Germany's ruling center-left government.
It faces a crucial election next month in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, widely seen as a dress rehearsal for next year's general election in Germany.
At the moment, polls indicate a government defeat. Since the scandal broke Fischer -- once Germany's most popular politician -- has seen his poll ratings slide.
A survey in the magazine Der Spiegel last weekend showed that the number of Germans wanting him to "play an important role" in the future was 54 percent, down 20 percent on January's figure.
Ludger Volmer, Fischer's deputy, has already had to resign.
On Monday, Fischer said it was wrong for Germany to shut its borders with countries to the east, despite a growing fear in Germany that cheap east European workers are taking German jobs.
Nor was it right that only the elite of a country should be able to travel to the EU.
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