GERMANY After 15 years in the political wilderness, Germany's oldest and biggest political party, the Social Democrats, gather today to rehearse for government. Ten months ahead of the next general election which offers the SPD the best chance of unseating Chancellor Helmut Kohl since he toppled the Social Democrat Mr Helmut Schmidt in 1982, the three-day annual party congress in Hanover will attempt to chart a path to power.
But instead the congress could usher in six months of rancour and rivalry at the top. While on the surface the gathering is to focus on the party programme, policy and the election manifesto, the consuming interest is in who is winning the battle to become the next social democratic chancellor.
The power struggle is between the party leader and master of the party apparatus, Mr Oskar Lafontaine, and the maverick Lower Saxony prime minister, Mr Gerhard Schroeder, darling of the opinion polls.
Although the congress is being held in Mr Schroeder's power base, Hannover, Mr Lafontaine is certain to dominate the gathering.
Mr Lafontaine sets the party line. Mr Schroeder bucks it. After months of uneasy amity, with party posters showing them as equals in the campaign to defeat Dr Kohl, the rivals are trading blows.
The Lafontaine-Schroeder jousting reflects the indecision and confusion among the opposition leadership, but is also symptomatic of the broader muddle at the apex of current German politics. While the Social Democratic duo slug it out, Bavaria's ruling Christian Social Union is also embroiled in infighting between the party leader and German finance minister, Mr Theo Waigel, and the Bavarian prime minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber. And Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats are similarly hostage to the politicking unleashed by the chancellor's anointment in September of his parliamentary leader, Mr Wolfgang Schaeuble, as his successor.
The net beneficiary of the SPD infighting is Chancellor Kohl, who would much prefer to encounter Mr Lafontaine at the polls next September than the slippery and popular Mr Schroeder.
While opinion surveys consistently suggest that Mr Schroeder is the only opposition figure who can defeat Mr Kohl, the Greens' leader, Joschka Fischer, may be right in declaring that Germans see Mr Lafontaine as unelectable.
Personal ambitions apart, considerable differences separate the two men. Mr Lafontaine is identified with the left of his party, Mr Schroeder as "the bosses' comrade", champion of the business class.
The biggest challenges by far confronting Germany are in the domestic economic area and it is here that the major political battles are to be fought. While Mr Schroeder espouses wage restraint, Mr Lafontaine favours an end to wage "moderation."