The telegenic Social Democrat (SPD) prime minister of Lower Saxony, Mr Gerhard Schroder, is on course to replace Dr Helmut Kohl as Germany's chancellor after September's federal election, according to an opinion poll published yesterday.
The gap between the SPD and Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) has narrowed to six points, but few political analysts believe the 68-year-old Chancellor can survive.
Yet the mood among Social Democrats this week has been nervous, and Mr Schroder was sounding cautious when he visited Paris yesterday to meet the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin. He was forced on to the defensive by Dr Kohl after he floated the idea of introducing a minimum income-tax rate for the self-employed. A few days earlier party colleagues questioned Mr Schroder's choice of Mr Jost Stollmann, a millionaire businessman, as his economics adviser.
Friction between Mr Schroder and his party may do the candidate no harm in his campaign to woo traditionally conservative voters. Like Britain's Mr Tony Blair, he owes much of his popularity to his image as a non-ideological pragmatist.
"I always say: first the country, then the party. If one is elected chancellor, one is no longer the candidate of one's party but chancellor of the entire people," Mr Schroder said this week.
The Social Democrats are receiving guidance from British Labour Party strategists about how to appeal to centrist voters with sharp, clear messages about jobs, the economy and crime. Mr Schroder cultivates an image as a friend of industry who is not afraid to upset his traditional supporters in the trade unions. And he takes an uncompromising position on law and order, even demanding that foreigners who commit crimes should be summarily deported.
Such hardline positions may appeal to conservative voters, but they place the SPD at odds with their favoured coalition partners in the Greens. The environmentalist party saw its poll ratings soar above 10 per cent in recent years as its parliamentary leader, Mr Joschka Fischer, steered a moderate course.
But a disastrous party conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg this year passed resolutions calling for Germany to withdraw from NATO, to cut its army in half and to triple the price of petrol. The party's popularity nose-dived, and Dr Kohl's allies identified the Greens as the Achilles' heel of the opposition alliance.
Remarks by a leading Green politician comparing the Bundes wehr to Hitler's army drew fire from Social Democrats as well as the government. And the SPD and the Greens clashed this week over how long it would take a "redgreen" coalition to close all Germany's nuclear power stations.
The fall in support for the Greens has set some Social Democrats thinking about a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, an option Dr Kohl has rejected.
But shrewd observers suggest divisions between the SPD and Greens during the election campaign may serve the interests of both parties by highlighting their distinct profiles. Despite the Chancellor's best efforts, centrist voters appear unwilling to hold Mr Schroder responsible for Green policies while Green supporters are keen to ensure their party has a distinct voice in government.
The Greens are determined to wield power in Bonn this time, and some senior figures admit another period in opposition could spell the end of their environmentalist project. But Mr Schroder's position is so strong that the Green tinge in any new coalition government may prove to be weak.
"Nobody needs to be afraid. The SPD would, in such a constellation, absolutely guarantee continuity in foreign and economic policy," according to Mr Schroder.
The Social Democrat candidate insists a change of government will not mean a revolution and that "we won't do everything differently but we'll do it better".
Such modesty is clearly attractive to Germany's notoriously conservative voters, who have not voted a single government out of office since the second World War. But it is a far cry from the grand project of social and ecological reform that Mr Schroder's radical allies have long been dreaming of.