Merkel risks further electoral setback

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks poised for a setback as polls show the country's most populous state will likely vote in favour of a centre-left government, which she has sought to label as irresponsibly spendthrift.

A week after voters in Greece and France clearly plumped for anti-austerity policies, the citizens of North Rhine-Westphalia could also punish conservative champions of belt-tightening.

About 13.2 million people - more than a fifth of Germany's electorate - are eligible to vote in Sunday's state legislative election in North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Cologne, Duesseldorf and the industrial Ruhr region.

The election is the third state-level vote this year and comes a week after a coalition of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats and pro-market Free Democrats - the parties that make up the national government - lost power in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

North Rhine-Westphalia, a traditional centre-left stronghold, is voting three years ahead of schedule after its current minority government, made up of Germany's main national opposition parties, narrowly failed to get a budget passed in March.

Opposition leaders declared that the vote would send an important signal ahead of national elections due in late 2013. Merkel said it offered an opportunity for the region to elect a government that wouldn't take on "ever more debt'.'

While national polls show Germans backing Merkel's pro-austerity line, surveys suggest that the regional government of Social Democrats and Greens led by popular governor Hannelore Kraft has a good chance of emerging strengthened, with a majority in the state legislature.

Conservative challenger Norbert Roettgen, Merkel's federal environment minister, has faced criticism for not committing himself to stay in state-level politics and for saying on a television show, in an apparent attempt at irony which backfired, that "regrettably'' voters rather than his party would decide whether he became governor.

Roettgen irritated his party by declaring that Sunday's election would decide "whether Angela Merkel's course in Europe is strengthened or whether it is weakened by the re-election of a pro-debt government in Germany'.'

Merkel told the Ruhr Nachrichten newspaper this week that the vote is "an important state parliament election for North Rhine-Westphalia -- no more, no less".

The struggling Free Democrats' main aim is to win the 5% of votes needed to retain their parliamentary seats, building on a surprisingly strong performance last weekend in Schleswig-Holstein.

The upstart Pirate Party, which has surged in recent months with a platform of near-total transparency and internet freedom but lacks policies on many issues - most prominently the debt crisis itself - hopes to enter its fourth state legislature. That could complicate the centre-left's chances of winning a majority.

While Germany's opposition, if it wins, will claim tail wind for next year's national vote, Sunday's election - unlike North Rhine-Westphalia's last vote in 2010 - would not change the national balance of power.

Two years ago, Merkel's coalition lost the state after five years in power there. That erased the national government's majority in the upper house of parliament, which represents Germany's 16 states, and its position there has since weakened further.

Current national polls consistently show Merkel's conservatives as the biggest party. However, they forecast a parliamentary majority neither for her centre-right coalition - which has become notorious for infighting on awide range of policy issues - nor for the Social Democrats and Greens, who ran Germany from 1998 to 2005.

When the national election comes, Merkel's chances of holding on to power still look decent, though perhaps with a new coalition partner.