Schroder fears 'Angie effect' as CDU closes gap

The woman at the top of Germany's Christian Democrats has worked wonders for her party, lifting it to within sight of the main governing party in opinion polls.

Less than a week after Angela Merkel was elected leader of the CDU, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder admitted yesterday that he lived in fear of the "Angie effect". Mr Schröder said in a television interview: "She commands respect and she is therefore dangerous."

Ms Merkel's impact has been spectacular. When she wrote a demolition piece on her former mentor Helmut Kohl in December, the Christian Democrats were trailing 15 points in the polls. But following its triumphant conference in Essen last week, the CDU is within one point of the Social Democrats, and in the personal popularity stakes Ms Merkel isstreets ahead of the Chancellor.

Much has happened in the intervening four months. Scandals destroyed the Old Guard. Their clumsy attempt to prevent Ms Merkel's election backfired, which rewarded her with an almost unanimous vote of support at the Essen conference. In the rebellion against the old regime, the second line of fiftysomethings fell by the wayside as the CDU skipped a generation. The party has thus become rejuvenated almost by default, finding itself led by a 45-year-old woman.

Mr Schröder has reason to be scared. His victory against Mr Kohl two years ago rested on his relative youthfulness and his appeal among women and East Germans. Thosegroups are now swinging to the woman from eastern Germany who is more than a decade younger than the Chancellor.

Sensing defeat in the beauty contest, Mr Schröder is pinning his hopes on substance. Ms Merkel, he intimated in the television interview, is lacking in that department.

"She must prove - and this is her weakness - that she can formulate detailed positions," he said. "Until now she has left a lot of things vague, and that certainly cannot remain so."

But substance has never been one of Mr Schröder's strengths, as his former friend Oskar Lafontaine likes to point out. "Red Oskar" kept silent while his estranged colleagues were wallowing in schadenfreude at the expense of the Christian Democrats. But now that he sees his former government heading into trouble, he is again putting in the boot.

The Weimar Republic had failed, Mr Lafontaine wrote in yesterday's Welt am Sonntag newspaper, because there were "too few engaged democrats".

He was therefore returning to politics forthwith to resume the crusade against coupon-clippers and "casino capitalism". Mr Schröder thus finds himself confronting an opposition and an opponent who have both returned from the dead.

Mr Lafontaine, during his short reign as German Finance Minister, railed against currency speculators, and sought to build a worldwide alliance against the likes of the financier George Soros.

Picking up where he had left off, he stated in yesterday's article: "Despite the interest of individual Wall Street firms, financial markets must be regulated again."

Mr Lafontaine feels deeply let down by the Social Democrat government, accusing it of favouring big business against the Mittelstand - Germany's much-vaunted small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.

At the same time, he praises the policies of the conservative opposition. Red Oskar is definitely back.