GERMANY: The heartland of German social democracy is poised to fall to conservatives after four decades tomorrow in a state election that could mark the beginning of the end of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's leadership in Berlin.
Voters in the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) appeared ready to vote out of office Germany's last SPD-Green Party state coalition, a vote of no confidence in economic and social reforms that have yet to cut high unemployment or halt the decline of the country's industrial heartland.
"It looks as though it will come to a change of government on Sunday," said Richard Hilmer of polling company Infratest. Most polls yesterday showed a six-to seven-point lead for the Christian Democrats, though a third of voters are still undecided, the SPD's last hope for a miracle.
With a nearly unbroken run of eight state election victories since the winter of 2003, another win tomorrow would confirm the authority of CDU leader Angela Merkel ahead of next year's general election.
The western state of North-Rhine Westphalia is a post-war creation of the Allies, fusing the Ruhr and the Rhineland. Politicians here joke that if NRW broke away from Germany it would be Europe's sixth-largest economy, ahead of Holland or the Russian Federation.
The state is just half the size of Ireland yet is home to over 18 million people, or one in five Germans. It is also home to one in five jobless and has one of the largest federal state deficits of €110 billion.
These are the figures that count in tomorrow's poll after an issue-free campaign the SPD tried to turn into a personality contest between their popular state premier Peer Steinbrück and the less-polished CDU figure of Jürgen Rüttgers, a former minister in former chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet.
Sensing defeat, the SPD launched a last-minute "capitalism critique" campaign, blaming economic ills on managers of multinational companies and comparing them to a biblical swarm of locusts on national economies. Mr Steinbrück told voters that managers are "slow to spread the wealth and quick to stick it in their own pockets".
That campaign was aimed at voters in the Ruhr, where the election will be won or lost and where disillusioned SPD voters say they will either stay at home or vote for the CDU for the first time in their lives.
The city of Gelsenkirchen has become a synonym for everything that has gone wrong in NRW.
Unemployment of 25 per cent puts it in the top 10 jobless black spots in the country, alongside depressed eastern German cities on the Polish border.
The city's population has shrunk by over a third to 260,000 in the last decade and the main shopping street is now a stretch of empty units and discount stores where people beg for money every 50 metres. It was once known as "the city of 1,000 fires", after the coal mines in the region. After their closure, Gelsenkirchen acquired the name "the city of 1000 fired".
Mining has a 150-year tradition here and 50 years ago over half a million men worked in the nearby pits.
It was the mining crisis of the 1960s that swept the SPD into power and into miners' hearts but now there are just 30,000 people working in five surviving mines.
Michael Köbrich has worked for 32 years in the Lippe mine in Gelsenkirchen, like his father and grandfather, and will stay here until it closes in accordance with a winding-down agreement that guarantees the mines €2 billion subsidies from the federal government in Berlin and €100 million from the NRW state government.
If elected, the CDU promises to break that agreement and speed up the winding-down process by halving the state subsidies.
"This election is the last chance for us," says Mr Köbrich, chain-smoking "Fair Play" brand cigarettes.
The premature closures will have a huge knock-on effect in Gelsenkirchen businesses dependent on the miners' incomes, he says.
"People still respect mining here. We are an industrial region so it's ridiculous when the CDU talk of self-employment and retraining intiatives. But they're winning over larger numbers of people."
Agenieszka Müller is one of those people, applying for retraining in Gelsenkirchen's state employment office, the Arbeitsamt.
"Perhaps with the CDU things will be better. Can they be worse?" asks the soft-spoken book-keeper, on the dole for three years.
"The Germans have a general problem, they're used to everything being done for them and they've become dependent. There should be a change of government, not that they will be able to change that mentality much," says René Krause, who's just signed on the dole and is planning to vote for the tiny extreme-right party, the Republikaner.
Another bastion of SPD voters has historically been the Ruhr's heavy manufacturing industry. But outside the Opel factory in Bochum, few of the workers leaving their shift seem interested in the election. "No time . . . no interest," they mutter as they rush past.
"Turnout will be the SPD's big problem. Problems like ours can no longer be solved by politicians. We learned that lesson," says one worker, referring to the recent decision to cut the workforce by two-thirds to just 7,000 despite strikes and interventions from SPD state ministers. "The bosses in General Motors in Detroit just say, 'keep out, this is our business'.
"The SPD is still talking about social justice, but for whom? That's over now."