Schroder is Chancellor of broken promises, says rival

Edmund Stoiber, Germany's conservative election challenger, dismissed Gerhard Schröder as "the Chancellor of broken promises" yesterday in a withering two-hour attack on the Social Democrat-led government, which he claimed had disqualified itself from holding a second term in office.

Mr Stoiber was given a five-minute standing ovation by 1,000 members of the opposition Christian Demo-crats at a party conference in Frankfurt intended to show the conservative campaign for the election on 22 September had begun in earnest.

"Germany is bottom of the league in economic growth and job creation," Mr Stoiber said. "Gerhard Schröder is the Chancellor of broken promises. Germany cannot afford to give him a second chance."

Describing Mr Schröder's employment and agriculture ministers respectively as a "master of disaster" and a "political catastrophe", Mr Stoiber pledged to roll back legislation that he said had "strangled entrepreneurial spirit" and failed to reduce Germany's four million unemployment totoal.

In east Germany, Mr Stoiber said the 18 per cent jobless rate was the highest in Europe, with an exodus of 40,000 young people a yeary. "Chancellor Schröder's plan to reconstruct the east is deconstructing the region," he said.

Critics who have accused Mr Stoiber of losing momentum by being soft on political opponents. Polls suggested the conservative 10-point lead over the Social Democrats has slipped to between 4 and 2 percentage points. The conservative candidate's personal popularity lags 10 percentage points behind Mr Schröder.