BERLIN — The three candidates seeking Chancellor
Angela Merkel's job face their first major prime-time TV debate on Sunday, with
her party's choice to succeed her desperately seeking to reverse a losing trend
less than a month before elections.
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The candidate of
Merkel's CDU-CSU alliance, Armin Laschet,
had gone into the election race with a comfortable lead over his rivals from
the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens.
But several missteps in the last weeks have left his
popularity in the doldrums and support for his party slipping just as Merkel is
due to bow out of politics after 16 years as German leader.
Instead, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, who was largely
written off by many in the beginning given lackluster support for his SPD, has
now sprung forward in the race.
He has even overtaken the leader of the Greens, Annalena
Baerbock, as she stumbled too from a series of scandals including plagiarism
claims.
A poll published by Bild am Sonntag newspaper just hours
before the TV battle showed support for Scholz's SPD climbing to 24 percent.
The CDU-CSU alliance meanwhile sank to its all-time worst score at 21 percent.
The Greens were at 17 percent.
The survey appears to confirm recent trends that support for
the SPD was surging and that for the conservatives waning, in the crucial last
lap of the election race.
Merkel's conservatives were now "in total panic,"
said Bild.
The picture was worse when it came to Germans want as
chancellor, with polls over the last weeks showing Scholz with a big lead over
Laschet and Baerbock.
The apparent splintered political landscape heralds
complicated talks ahead to form a government, as mathematically, three parties
would be needed for a stable coalition.
For the first time in over a decade, stable Germany was
staring at a potentially turbulent political future.
Hopes pinned on debate
Laschet, currently state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia,
saw the tide turn against him during the deadly floods that struck western
Germany in mid-July.
Caught on camera chuckling behind in the background with
local officials while Germany's president gave a speech mourning victims of
deadly floods, Laschet has since been unable to halt a falling trend in
popularity.
Underlining the seriousness of the situation for Merkel's
conservatives, which have led four consecutive coalitions, Sueddeutsche said
the CDU-CSU "will have to fight at the moment to be even in a position to
be in negotiations for the next government".
"At the CDU headquarters, they are now placing their
hopes on the three-way debate of the chancellor candidates," it said.
In comparison, Scholz has avoided mistakes.
"Like no other of his competitors, he has embodied the
statesman in the election battle, the one who finds the right words, be it
during the flood disaster in July or about the terrible images that have
reached us from Afghanistan," noted right-leaning Welt daily.
It also pointed out that for those longing for a
continuation of Merkel's style of no-frills but steady government may have
picked Scholz as their choice.
Even if they hail from different parties, Scholz himself is
not shy about letting a bit of the shine from the still popular Merkel rub off
on him.
"It is never bad for a man to be compared with a
successful chancellor," he said in a recent interview with Sueddeutsche
daily.
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