Victory in sight, German conservatives show unity

GERMANY'S conservatives put on a show of unity at a weekend party conference ahead of an election expected to return them to power, but the record suggests preserving harmony won't be easy.

"There is not a sheet of paper between us," Christian Social Union (CSU) head Edmund Stoiber said yesterday of relations between his party and that of Angela Merkel, conservative candidate for Chancellor and head of the Christian Democrats (CDU).

Merkel and Stoiber were all smiles on Friday when she put in an appearance at a CSU party conference in the picturesque southern city of Nuremberg.

Some 900 delegates and a crowd of young T-shirt wearing supporters cheered Merkel as she lambasted her opponent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and praised Stoiber. Stoiber, in turn, declared Merkel the next Chancellor of Germany.

But the warm words could not paper over decades of internal battles between the CDU and its notoriously self-confident Bavarian sibling - conflicts many believe will re-emerge quickly if the conservatives beat Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) in a September 18 election.

"They cover up the internal quarrels of recent weeks and the long-evident conflicts that will come after the election," the local Nürnberger Nachrichten newspaper remarked.

Merkel herself has a long history of friction with the CSU and Stoiber, who was once quoted in a German newspaper as saying she was no match for Schroeder.

Stoiber, Bavarian state premier and Schroeder's unsuccessful challenger in the 2002 election, has refused to say whether he wants to serve in her cabinet or stay in Munich.

His interventions on the campaign trail - notably disparaging comments about east German voters - have threatened to derail the conservatives in an election the polls predict Merkel will win.

The two sister parties have always had a turbulent relationship, which nearly broke down altogether in the 1970s as the strong-willed Bavarian premier Franz-Josef Strauss fell out with then CDU leader Helmut Kohl.

Since then, they have managed to avoid lasting splits although sometimes bitter disagreements, such as a damaging quarrel over tax and health policy that lasted through most of last year, invariably resurface.

Personal rivalries, the heavily-Catholic CSU's more conservative attitude to family, religion and the role of women, as well as scepticism about the more radical economic reforms recently proposed by the CDU, have been the cause.

Merkel, a twice-married, childless Protestant from the former communist east, is hardly their ideal candidate and Stoiber only reluctantly accepted he could not stand again.

The relationship between the parties is, in any case, a peculiar one. CDU candidates do not stand for election in Bavaria nor does the CSU stand outside its home state, although the two parties sit jointly together in the federal parliament.