Schroeder Campaigns on Anti-American Platform – Again

BERLIN – Three years ago, Chancellor Schroeder whipped up German opposition to a American-led war in Iraq to snatch an unlikely second term. This time, the chancellor is playing up the danger of an American military clash with Iran – but he faces a taller order to distract Germans from the country’s economic doldrums.With elections less than five weeks away, opinion polls put Mr. Schroeder’s Social Democrats about 12 points behind opposition conservatives, setting the scene for Angela Merkel to become Germany’s first female chancellor.But a debate over Iran and the emergence of Germany’s lingering east-west divide as a hot-button issue have provided a chink of daylight to Mr. Schroeder, a wily campaigner who remains popular with the public and has triumphed in adversity before.President Bush and his foreign policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are deeply unpopular in Germany, and Mr. Schroeder is trying to work the magic that saw him come from behind in 2002 by forcefully opposing the armed intervention that ousted Saddam Hussein.Launching his campaign in his hometown of Hanover on Saturday, Mr. Schroeder issued his warning on Iran – even as he insisted America and Germany’s European allies had to take a strong line in negotiating with Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.“But take the military options off of the table. We have seen that they’re not suitable,” the chancellor said.The remark apparently played off Mr. Bush’s statement the day before that “all options are on the table” in the confrontation with Iran.Mr. Schroeder aides insist he didn’t intend to contradict Mr. Bush, and American officials have played down differences with Berlin, where they could soon be dealing with a friendlier administration under Ms. Merkel.Ms. Merkel herself has said little on the subject, perhaps mindful of the criticism she received after her 2003 trip to Washington on the eve of the Iraq war, during which she was perceived by some as overly friendly to the Bush administration.During campaigning yesterday in the central city of Bielefeld, Mr. Schroeder said he doubted that Ms. Merkel’s party would “have the steadfastness of will if they come under outside pressure” over the use of military options in Iran.So far, the struggle for control of the European Union’s most-populous country has been dominated by debate over how to adapt Germany’s cumbersome tax and welfare systems to global competition and bolster a lame economy. Growth is expected to slow to 1% this year – too slow to make up for years of stagnation that have produced unemployment topping 11% nationwide.Polls show Germans have little faith in government efforts to engineer a turnaround, and some commentators are certain there is no way back before election day on September 18.“Voters seem to have the unshakable view that the center-left has governed badly,” the head of the Forsa polling company and a former Schroeder adviser, Manfred Guellner, said.But while Mr. Schroeder’s party is suffering, polls also show that the chancellor’s personal image as a seasoned statesman who kept German troops out of Iraq remains intact.The chancellor has continued to allude to the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq in insisting that the “very worrying” Iran problem demands a diplomatic solution.“Military options don’t help, we’ve seen that,” Mr. Schroeder told about 8,000 people at a rally in the eastern city of Dresden on Monday. “We shouldn’t want to see it again.”Armed intervention is the “very last resort” – and then only with a U.N. mandate, Mr. Schroeder said – another dig at Mr. Bush’s go-it-alone foreign policy.Senior conservatives attacked him. Ms. Merkel’s deputy, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who traveled to Washington last month to pledge warmer German-American ties, accused Mr. Schroeder of encouraging Tehran to think the West is divided.“He is prepared to accept an increased risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb,” Mr. Schaeuble said in Monday’s die Welt newspaper.But Ms. Merkel scrambled to defuse a possible vote-loser, telling another newspaper that there was “absolutely no difference” between Mr. Schroeder’s policy on Iran and her own.A newspaper normally sympathetic to Mr. Schroeder, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said his parallels between Iran and Iraq were “laughable.”“Schroeder has used a vague remark from Bush to suggest we’re mobilizing” for war, the daily wrote in an editorial yesterday. “But it’s still enough to leave the conservatives floundering.”Ms. Merkel must also repair the damage from remarks made by Edmund Stoiber, head of the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, that disparaged East German voters – a key misstep with a new left-wing party composed of renegade Social Democrats and former East German communists running strong in the east.“In 2002, voters were genuinely scared that Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction and missiles capable of reaching Germany,” Mr. Guellner said. “We’re far from that situation with Iran.“Voters would like to keep Schroeder,” he added, “but not his government.”

Schroeder Campaigns on Anti-American Platform – Again

Schroeder Campaigns on Anti-American Platform – Again

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