After a disastrous campaign, Germany's conservatives finally went on the offensive yesterday - accusing the country's finance minister Hans Eichel of having a secret plan to slash billions of euros from the budget after Sunday's general election, writes Luke Harding.
Eichel's officials have angrily denied that a so-called 'Giftliste' or 'poison list' exists, while the Social Democrat chairman Franz Müntefering dismissed the claim as a 'fairy-tale'.
The Christian Democrats, however, are sticking to their guns. This morning Bild, Germany's rightwing mass-circulation tabloid, splashed on the row, posing the rhetorical question: 'Lügt Eichel? (Is Eichel lying?). The paper quoted the Christian Democrats' chairman Volker Kauder insisting that Eichel was indeed 'lying' to the voters.
The row appears to be an attempt to regain the initiative from Germany's chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He has led a brutally effective campaign himself against Angela Merkel's shadow finance minister Paul Kirchhof. Kirchhof - who wants a 25% flat tax - has become the conservatives' biggest electoral liability, with Schröder suggesting that the 'professor from Heidelberg' wants to use Germans as 'laboratory rats' in some kind of Frankensteinian neo-liberal experiment.
In the wake of Kirchhof, the Social Democrats' ratings have gone up by 3 or 4% in the final two weeks of the campaign - to the point where the outcome of Sunday's election is still too close to call (although Angie is still likely to be chancellor). This latest Eichel kerfuffle is unlikely to make much difference to the result. But two conclusions can be drawn - 1) Germany's election has got nasty and 2) whoever becomes Germany's fiance minister on Sunday has a tough job ahead of him/her and will almost certainly be forced to make cuts.
