GERMANY: At least one ethnic group is undecided how to vote in Germany's elections, writes Derek Scally, in Berlin
It's a tight squeeze in the Turkish market. Fat women in headscarves haggle over the price of tomatoes and sunflower seeds with sweating salesman who shout bargain prices in Turkish.
The balmy air is perfumed with aniseed, coming from the water pipes smoked by men in a streetside cafe.
The only clue that this market is in Berlin and not Istanbul are the German election posters. One of the faces from the posters, the moustached, bespectacled Social Democrat (SPD) Ahmet Iyidirili (49), is working his way through the crowd, attracting amused looks and friendly shouts.
Mr Iyidirili has lived here for three decades and holds a German passport, but for many he is still the "Turkish" candidate, one of three running for election in Berlin. His constituency of Kreuzberg is a synonym for Berlin social decay, with its one-third immigrant population generally mentioned in the same breath as its high crime rate and spiralling unemployment of over 20 per cent.
"I'm not the Turkish or migrant candidate but the candidate for Berliners," says Mr Iyidirili. "The migrants in the SPD aren't just about integration or migration issues. We have many competent environmental and economics politicians."
He hopes to win the constituency by mobilising Kreuzberg's 10,000 Turkish-German voters, reflecting an SPD election push nationwide.
Germany is home to over 2.5 million Turkish-born immigrants and their German-born children. Some 600,000 naturalised citizens are entitled to vote - a small enough grouping in an electorate of 60 million, but large enough to matter in a tight race. The Turkish vote helped secure Chancellor Schröder's narrowest of wins in 2002 and could be crucial again on September 18th.
Turkish-Germans are a paradox: generally more conservative than the rest of the population, yet far less likely to vote for the Christian Democrats (CDU) than any other population group.
"A Muslim would sooner allow his hand to rot away before checking the box next to the CDU on his ballot," said Henry Nitzsche, a CDU politician from the German state of Saxony. Remarks like that reflect the level of intolerance, suspicion and prejudice common between the CDU and the Turkish community.
The party's opposition to Turkey's EU accession is - unsurprisingly - unpopular among Turks here. But it appears to be a calculated move: gamble the lost Turkish vote on gaining a potentially greater voter bonus from the majority of Germans in the opinion polls who oppose Turkey's EU accession.
The SPD has always been the natural home for Turkish voters, but many speak of their frustration with new anti-terrorism laws and tighter immigration legislation that stripped many naturalised citizens of their dual nationality. Hoping to profit from that frustration, and anger at economic reforms and 11 per cent unemployment, is the new Left Party, an alliance between former SPD left-wingers and the reformed communists.
"The reforms are far removed from the social justice that the SPD is supposed to stand for. I'm not the only one turning away from the party," said Hakki Keskin, one of Germany's first MPs of Turkish origin.
He left the SPD earlier this year after 30 years to join the Left Party, which he hopes will attract the votes of Turkish families hit by the "neo-liberal" reforms of his former party.
Near the Turkish market in Kreuzberg, a group of men sip tea in a barber shop and discuss a dilemma shared by many German voters in the last days before the general election. "I haven't seen anything good from the reforms so far. Schröder's had no luck, but no competition either," says one, dismissing the Left Party out of hand. "The Social Democrats are the best of a bad lot."