German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is playing the anti-Iraq war card strongly in the hope of resurrecting a flagging European election campaign for his Social Democratic Party (SPD).
In a move that recalls his tactics in the German general election almost two years ago, but builds on a broader anti-war mood, Schröder and his senior colleagues appear confident that the peace-mongering will pay dividends at the ballot box in the European elections on June 13.
Schröder has been careful not to criticise United States President George W Bush by name, for fear of reopening the hostility between the US and Berlin over the Iraq war. But he is using the campaign trail to take a swipe at the divisive US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
At a campaign rally in Mannheim, a Rhine town near the French border, the chancellor’s anti-war comments drew the loudest cheers of the evening from a crowd of about 1 500.
Clearly feeling vindicated in his anti-war stance by the recent events in Iraq, Schröder demanded an apology from the leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel, who stood four-square behind the US on Iraq, and who is now attempting to back-peddle from her full commitment to the war.
”I don’t want to point out that we were right [on Iraq],” Schröder told the rally to roars of laughter. ”There shouldn’t be any ‘we told you sos’.” But the least he expected from Merkel was a ”word of regret” and an admission that the centre-right was wrong on Iraq.
Teenagers in the audience brandished large posters declaring the Social Democrats, Germany and Europe ”the power for peace”, a slogan that the party’s campaign managers have turned into a central plank of the election platform in an attempt to avoid a drubbing.
The Schröder campaign pitch, implicitly criticising British Prime Minister Tony Blair, proclaims: ”The peoples of Europe were in agreement — in the Iraq conflict they supported the policy of Gerhard Schröder and the SPD.”
The chancellor opened his speech to the voters with a jibe directed at Rumsfeld. ”There is no such thing as an old Europe and a new Europe. There is one Europe and we have to look after it,” he said in a reference to Rumsfeld’s famous quip alleging that old Europeans (France and Germany) opposed the war, while new Europeans (Britain and Eastern Europe) supported Washington. In an unusual criticism of the Bush administration, the chancellor said that any attempts to divide Europe would be resisted and would fail.
The European elections in three weeks are turning into a mid-term ordeal for Schröder, with opinion polls predicting large gains for the Christian Democrats. A recent poll put the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 20 points ahead of the SPD, which is plumbing new depths of well under 30%.
A poll on Wednesday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper gave the CDU almost 47% to the SPD’s 24,5%.
Party strategists are calculating that the anti-war stance will at least reduce the SPD losses. In a show of unity with the French, the strongest critics of the US war, Schröder was flanked at the Mannheim rally by the parliamentary chief of the French Socialists, Jean-Marc Ayrault who, to loud applause, singled out the chancellor as a ”loyal partner” with his ”courageous rejection of the war in Iraq”.
Schröder scraped to a second term against the CDU two years ago with the thinnest of victories, ascribed to his opposition to the war, a stance that caused a crisis in German-US relations.
His anti-war campaign is much more marked than in 2002. ”It’s not so populist and it’s entirely legitimate,” said a senior SPD official.
Ute Vogt, the regional SPD leader and a party vice-president, told the rally that German troops were marching into France and Poland 60 years ago, drawing a parallel between then and now. Were it not for the few thousand votes that prevented a CDU victory two years ago, she said, Germans would now be calling for their soldiers to be brought home from Iraq.
”It has always been the Social Democrats who were on the side of peace, never leading Germany into war. We can be proud of that.” — Â