Race card fear in run up to German poll

With only one week left before the polls and his prospects of victory receding by the day, Germany's centre-right leader, Edmund Stoiber, faces a crucial decision.

Should he continue hammering away at the broken promises and economic failures of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder or should he change tack and deploy the ultimate weapon of the political right – racism – in the hope of retrieving some of the votes that have slipped from his grasp?

Until this weekend, the German election campaign had been remarkably free of the racist innuendo and open anti-immigrant rhetoric that so marked this year's elections in France and the Netherlands. Far-right political parties are banned, and the centre-right alliance of Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists (CDU/CSU) has steered clear of the subject.

Now, though, with his long-standing poll lead evaporating, the words "immigration" and "foreigners" have started to enter Mr Stoiber's campaign vocabulary. They are nowhere near the top of his speeches; they are added on the quiet towards the end. But they are there.

Addressing the final sitting of the Bundestag on Friday, Mr Stoiber tore into Mr Schröder for his "isolationist" stance on Iraq and for the "shame" of Germany's four million unemployed. But from the jobless he shifted effortlessly into a call to halt immigration. "There are already too many children with inadequate German. Immigration should be stopped. Carrying on will only pile up more problems."

From immigration, Mr Stoiber slid just as effortlessly on to terrorism. "Germany," he said, "must not be a training ground or armaments fair for terrorists." Unemployment, immigrants, terrorism: the sentences were separate, but the inference was crystal clear.

This weekend in Munich, the heart of Stoiberdom, some of his supporters forecast that the campaign would get dirty in its last few days. Not only do they believe that Mr Schröder has cynically tricked voters into following his anti-war line on Iraq. On a domestic front, they claim he has held out promises of generous hand-outs to victims of last month's devastating floods which he has no chance or intention of keeping.

The counter-argument, though, and the main reason why Mr Stoiber has eschewed this approach so far, is that he risks losing vital support elsewhere, and even jeopardising his electoral alliance. Mr Stoiber has worked hard to banish the hard-right reputation he built up as Bavaria's interior minister between 1988 and 1993, when he became the state premier.

Bavarian candidates and Stoiber aides in Bavaria could afford the merest flicker of anti-immigration language in their campaigning and briefings, but it was more implicit than open. Outside his home state, anything immigration-related was strictly off limits.

This was partly a matter of changing times. But it was also the calculation that any Bavarian conservative who sought election as a national leader had to move towards the centre if he was not to repel the key constituency of CDU voters in more liberal North-Rhine Westphalia. Both the image change and the electoral calculation served Mr Stoiber well until the flood disaster gave Chancellor Schröder the opportunity to shine.

The last week of campaigning will take Mr Stoiber into the "swing state" of North-Rhine Westphalia, into former East Germany and back to Bavaria. His campaign pitch in the closing days will determine not only whether he has a future in German national politics, but what sort of a reputation he leaves in the country at large if, as seems likely, electoral defeat sends him back to his state premier's office in Munich.