German opposition candidate Peer Steinbrueck’s drive to become chancellor is going into reverse.

Steinbrueck’s Social Democratic Party gathers this weekend
in the Bavarian town of Augsburg as the gap with Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s bloc widens. The SPD’s answer is a platform that
appeals to core Socialist values through reining in banks,
taxing the rich and reducing social inequality it says has grown
under Merkel. Delegates will vote on the platform on April 14.

Even if voters prove responsive to the SPD message, they’ve
yet to embrace its bearer. Steinbrueck, the finance minister in
Merkel’s first-term coalition who is now vying to unseat her at
Sept. 22 federal elections, needs to overcome an 18 percentage-
point deficit in the polls, while his personal rating, already
low, is on the decline.

“It’s the worst of all combinations,” Jan Techau,
director of the Brussels center of the Carnegie Endowment, said
in an interview. “You have a candidate who doesn’t match the
party; an SPD which still hasn’t recovered from its all-time low
in the last election; and there’s no sense that voters want a
change or that Merkel’s a spent force.”

Less than six months before the election, Steinbrueck’s
challenge is to stop Merkel securing a third term by winning
over an electorate that says it likes what she does. The task is
all the greater after more than three years of euro-area crisis
that has thrust Merkel to the fore of Europe’s policy response,
winning her plaudits at home even as she’s blamed elsewhere for
causing an economic and political rift dividing north and south.

‘Huge Amount’

“A huge amount has to be done, no doubt about it,”
Gerhard Schroeder, the former SPD chancellor who served two
terms at the head of a coalition with the Green Party before
losing to Merkel in 2005, said in a television interview with
Bloomberg HT yesterday in Adana, Turkey.

Steinbrueck’s challenge has grown more formidable as polls
show Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc moving into position
to reprise its current coalition with the Free Democratic Party.

Support for Merkel’s coalition climbed to 47 percent in a
Forsa poll published April 10, the highest level since January
2010 projecting a clear majority for the first time in more than
three years. The SPD and Greens dropped two percentage points to
a combined 37 percent in the April 2-5 poll of 2,002 voters. The
results have a margin of error of as much as 2.5 percentage
points.

Fumbled Statements

Steinbrueck goes to Bavaria seeking to rekindle his base
and narrow the gap with the chancellor after a series of fumbled
statements that tarnished his reputation gained in government as
a crisis manager. The party is due to sign off on policies
including the introduction of a minimum hourly wage of 8.50
euros ($11.15), bonus caps and a “redemption fund” to pool
euro-area debt and help alleviate the north-south division.

More difficult for Steinbrueck may be championing policies
— and rhetoric — at odds with the positions he espoused as
Merkel’s finance chief and a rescuer of the country’s banks.

With public support for Merkel’s crisis management and
what’s seen as a steady hand on the economy, the SPD has geared
its message toward turning back the tide of unhindered
capitalism and wealth redistribution: it wants to raise the top
tax rate for those earning more than 100,000 euros to 49 percent
from as much as 45 percent.

“The pressure’s built up over these crisis years and comes
from voters who want real change, whether in labor-market rules
or in reining in the excesses of banks,” Matthias Ecke, 30, a
deputy chairman of the party’s JUSO young Socialist wing, said
in an interview.

Chancellor Salary

As he steps forward as a champion of the have-nots,
Steinbrueck has confounded the SPD’s base by proclaiming that
the chancellor’s 220,000-euro salary is too low and drawing
criticism for accepting fees for speeches to industry groups.
His approval rating dropped to an 8-year low of 32 percent
compared with 68 percent for Merkel, an April 5 ARD broadcaster
poll showed.

While Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc leads the SPD by 41 percent to
23 percent in the latest Forsa poll, Germany’s electoral
calculus means that she needs a coalition partner, and support
for her current FDP ally is hovering at or barely above the
threshold to win parliamentary seats. Of the six regular opinion
polls, only Forsa gives her current coalition a governing
majority.

The SPD also is unified behind its platform and is closing
ranks behind its candidate. Steinbrueck “is the galleon
figure” for the platform, Ernst Dieter Rossmann, an SPD
lawmaker in the progressive left wing of the party, said by
phone. “He has our full confidence.”

What’s more, the SPD has been here before. In April 2005, a
little less than six months before the election, Schroeder too
trailed Merkel by 18 percentage points. He hauled his party back
to within one point of Merkel’s bloc on election day,
confounding the polls and allowing the SPD to re-enter
government, albeit with Merkel taking his place as chancellor.

“We’ve had the experience that six months ahead of the
election you can’t make any predictions that are reliable,”
Schroeder said yesterday. “As far as I’ve known Peer
Steinbrueck, he’ll win elections, not top polls.”

For Related News and Information:

To contact the reporters on this story:
Patrick Donahue in Berlin at
pdonahue1@bloomberg.net;
Brian Parkin in Berlin at
bparkin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net

April 12 (Bloomberg) — Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder talks about Social Democrat candidate Peer Steinbrueck’s presidential bid.
He spoke yesterday with Bloomberg HT’s Hande Berktan in Adana, Turkey. (This is an excerpt in German. Source: Bloomberg HT)