GERMANY: Germany's general election on Sunday is hurtling to a chaotic conclusion with 14 million voters still undecided and opinion polls suggesting at least three possible outcomes.
The Christian Democrats (CDU) were forced on the defensive yesterday, denying a newspaper report that they would rather push for another election than rule with chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) in a grand coalition.
The latest opinion polls show that, without a strong swing in the last 48 hours, a hung parliament could emerge on Sunday evening.
The speculation and uncertainty pushed the euro to a two-week low against the dollar as German analysts - financial and political - tried to get their heads round this electoral conundrum.
An unnamed deputy CDU leader told the regional Leipziger Volkszeitung that CDU leader Angela Merkel had discussed options with constitutional experts should she fail to win an absolute majority, the so-called "chancellor majority", required to install her as German leader.
One option could open the door to president Horst Köhler dissolving the new parliament and calling for a second general election.
A CDU spokesmen dismissed this as "nonsense" and "absurd", but the move is constitutionally possible and nothing can be ruled out considering the latest opinion polls.
The preferred CDU coalition with the liberal Free Democrats has 48 per cent of the vote, according to yesterday's poll by the Forsa agency, just short of an overall majority. The SPD and Greens have 42 per cent and, combined with the new Left Party, 49 per cent of the vote.
None of the parties wants to have anything to do with the Left Party, an electoral alliance of reformed communists and breakaway SPD left-wingers.
That makes a CDU-SPD coalition an option - mathematically at least - but one Dr Merkel is keen to discount.
"Many citizens think that if a coalition isn't possible, the automatic consequence would be a grand coalition. And I say: that won't happen," said Dr Merkel to the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper.
Whatever the outcome, Mr Schröder is increasingly unlikely to play a political role after the election.
One of his likely successors in the SPD, former state premier Peer Steinbruck, said: "It's the voters, not us politicians, who make coalitions. We have to be open for the majorities that the citizens decide at the ballot box."
Such remarks have increased the nervousness in the Green Party camp.
Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer warned his coalition partners not to enter government with the CDU.
"For the SPD that would mean nothing more than falling to its knees in front of the anti-social neo-conservative brand of Kirchhof," he said, referring to the CDU's finance expert and flat tax proponent, Paul Kirchhof.