German election diary: Laschet lashes out; vote for die Urbane?

PANIC HAS set in at the Konrad Adenauer House, the Berlin HQ of Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU). The long-ailing Social Democrats (SPD), under the steady hand of Olaf Scholz, their candidate for the chancellorship, have opened a clear polling lead, and Armin Laschet, the candidate for the CDU and its Bavarian CSU ally, is plumbing new depths of unpopularity. What to do? Mr Laschet’s answer was to unveil, on September 3rd, a group of obscure advisory “experts” to lend his floundering campaign intellectual heft. They spanned the CDU’s “Christian-social, liberal wings”, beamed Mr Laschet, meaning that they could not agree on a single thing. Observers detected desperation.A second tactic has been to raise a red scare. Mr Scholz has not ruled out forming a coalition with the Greens and Die Linke, a small hard-left outfit partly derived from East Germany’s Communists. (Nor will he; to do so would reduce his leverage in post-election coalition talks.) The liveliest moment in an otherwise dull televised debate between the chancellor-candidates on August 29th came when Mr Laschet launched a broadside against Mr Scholz for holding the door open to Die Linke. Two days later even Angela Merkel, who has sought desperately to stay out of the campaign, repeated the charge. Mr Scholz, an ultra-moderate who is as likely to invite the Russophiles of Die Linke into government as he is to don a outfit and down a litre of on the streets of Cologne, can probably take the blows. A poll on September 2nd, the first since the debate, gave the SPD a five-point lead over the CDU/CSU—the biggest yet. __________