Election Voter Turnout Slightly Down

Polling stations opened across Germany on Sunday for the country's tightly-fought general elections with millions of undecided voters heading to the polls with the power to potentially influence economic reform not only in their own country but throughout Europe.

Voting opened at 8:00 UTC and by 14:00, 41.9 percent of Germany's eligible voters had gone to the polls. The figure is slightly below the 2002 numbers of 42.8 percent, but pollsters expect voting to pick up as the day wears on. Voting closes at 18:00 and the first exit polls are expected to be announced shortly after, with a provisional result expected in the early hours of Monday morning.

Early indications showed that the election would attract a good turn out with bright but crisp fall weather predicted across Germany for election day. Some shops in a number of German cities were also opening for business in anticipation of citizens taking to the high streets after casting their votes in the September sunshine.

The usually stoic Germans are also likely to be fired by one of the most fiercely contested election battles of recent times with a seemingly on-the-ropes Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pulling out all the stops in his election campaign to claw back the once unassailable lead held by his rival, the conservative opposition leader Angela Merkel.

Both candidates for chancellor cast their ballots on Sunday morning as the voting gathered pace.

A smiling Gerhard Schröder voted in his northern German hometown of Hanover along with his wife, former journalist Doris Schröder-Köpf, and posed at length for photographers but made no statement before heading back to Berlin.

Angela Merkel, wearing a mint-green jacket, gave a relaxed smile to a barrage of cameramen clustering around her and her husband Joachim Sauer as she voted at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Like Schröder, she too made no comment after casting her ballot.

Other politicians were likely to vote sooner rather than later to allow them to get back to campaigning, which is expected to continue right up until the polls close in the early evening.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and a member of the Greens who have governed with the Social Democrats for the past seven years, cast his ballot in Berlin before rejoining his party's efforts.

Polls put Merkel in driving seat

Opinion polls have predicted that Merkel will unseat Schröder to become the country's first female chancellor. They say that Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is likely to win over 40 percent of the vote, but that a resurgent Schröder may yet keep her from forming a government with her chosen partner, the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

Unprecedented numbers of undecided voters hold the key to whether Merkel can muster enough support to form the center-right coalition government she says is needed to push through deep reforms of Germany's ailing economy.

If the CDU does not get enough votes, Merkel will probably be forced to share power with Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) in a "grand coalition" that financial markets fear would produce gridlock and stall the reforms that Schröder himself has already begun.

A poll by the Allensbach institute published in Saturday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung showed the Christian Democrats with 41.5 percent and the Free Democrats with eight percent -- barely enough to form a government.

Is Schröder's combatative campaign his last?

The chancellor has thrown himself into campaigning with such enthusiasm that his opponents have been rocked and his apparent desire to go down fighting has raised the possibility that the SPD may be able to salvage something from the election even if Schröder himself steps down in defeat.

Some feel that the charismatic incumbent should be given one more chance. "I am going to vote for the Social Democrats again because I think they had too little time to implement reforms. We should give them a chance to carry on," Juliane Fischer, a 28-year-old nurse, told AFP before voting in the working class district of Hellensdorf in Berlin.

The election was called by Schröder one year early in a risky bid to win a fresh mandate for his reform program after the SPD suffered a mauling at the hands of the CDU in the former Social Democratic stronghold state of North-Rhine Westphalia in May. The chancellor then called for a vote of confidence which he deliberately lost to force a new election. After the legality of the process was approved, campaigning began in earnest last month.

It has made for the shortest campaign in German postwar history and a race so close that the two main parties have broken with tradition and will campaign right up to the end of polling at 18:00 on Sunday.