Germany's centre-left government came under pressure to change course yesterday following its poor showing in Sunday's European elections. While politicians from the governing Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens argued over who was to blame for the result, the conservative opposition claimed a historic victory.
The Christian Democrats (CDU) increased their share of the vote by almost 10 per cent to 48.7 per cent, leaving the SPD of the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, far behind with 30.7 per cent. The Greens saw their vote fall by 3.7 per cent to 6.4 per cent, while the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) won seats in the European Parliament for the first time, with 5.8 per cent of the vote.
As the Christian Democrats celebrated their triumph, Bavaria's Prime Minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber, demanded that one of Germany's two new European Commissioners should come from the ranks of the opposition.
Mr Schroder has promised his coalition partners in the Greens that their nominee, Berlin's former environment minister, Ms Michaela Schreyer, will be given one of the posts.
Arguing that it was unacceptable that the "out-and-out losers" of the European election should provide both commissioners, Mr Stoiber suggested that his party colleague, the former health minister, Mr Horst Seehofer, should be sent to Brussels instead.
One of Germany's two commissioners has traditionally come from an opposition party and some of the Chancellor's own colleagues are uncomfortable with his decision to break with this convention. The veteran Social Democrat MEP, Mr Klaus Hansch, said yesterday that it was not too late for Mr Schroder to change his mind. The SPD's vice-chairwoman, Ms Renate Schmidt, blamed the government's poor showing on incompetent campaigning and a lack of sensitivity to voters' anxieties. Mr Klaus Zwickel, leader of IG Metall, Germany's biggest trade union, interpreted the outcome as a warning to the government that the public was losing patience with Mr Schroder's failure to tackle unemployment.
Left-wingers in the SPD seized on Sunday's vote as evidence that the Chancellor's flirtation with Blairite "Third Way" policies was unpopular with voters. Mr Schroder and the British Prime Minister recently published a joint paper calling on European Social Democrats to adopt more business-friendly economic policies.
Mr Schroder's allies made it clear yesterday that there was no question of changing course or of returning to the left-wing economic policies favoured by the former finance minister, Mr Oskar Lafontaine.
One of the Green Party's leaders, Ms Antje Radke, described the election result as catastrophic and said that the Greens would now have to accentuate the distinction between themselves and their SPD coalition partners.
Green leaders were privately expressing relief yesterday that their internal divisions over the Kosovo conflict did not exact an even greater toll on their vote on Sunday. Some local party organisations refused to take part in the European election campaign in protest against their leaders' support for NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
If the government parties fared badly on Sunday, the election was an unmitigated disaster for the opposition Liberal Free Democrats (FDP), who won just 3 per cent of the vote and failed to win any seats in the European Parliament for the second term in a row.
The party's leader, Mr Wolfgang Gerhard, acknowledged that the electorate had given the Liberals a slap in the face but he ruled out any change in their doctrinaire, free-market policies.
The PDS claimed that Sunday's election represented an important victory for the party, which draws almost all its support from the formerly communist east of the country. The party may have owed some of its success to its opposition to NATO's campaign against Yugoslavia - a position shared by many disgruntled Social Democrats and Greens.
Among the six PDS MEPs who will sit in the European Parliament is Mr Hans Modrow, a former prime minister of the German Democratic Republic.
