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Schroeder, challenger Merkel vow to win German election
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-09-13 11:09

In their last face-to-face meeting before the German general election, both Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and opposition frontrunner Angela Merkel predicted that they would succeed in gaining a majority and avoid a grand coalition, AFP reported.

As polls showed that the conservative opposition's once commanding lead has been eroded, the possibility is growing that Sunday's election will produce an awkward marriage of Schroeder's Social Democrats and Merkel's Christian Democrats.

Neither party wants such an outcome and their leaders insisted in a round-table TV debate on the ARD public broadcaster that their respective coalitions would win.

Conservative challenger Angela Merkel, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Union, delivers a speech during an election campaign rally in the northern German town of Hamburg September 12, 2005. [Reuters]

"There will not be a grand coalition," Merkel said. "Unlike the chancellor, I don't place great store on opinion polls."

Merkel said voters could opt for the country's economic standstill to continue or "if they want a future, they can choose the option we are offering".

Schroeder said he was "very optimistic that we will finish in front" and Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister and the best-known member of Schroeder's junior coalition partners, the Greens, said he believed "events are going our way".

The chancellor said he based his optimism on his belief that voters were satisfied the existing coalition had shown that "reform is possible without abandoning social cohesion, that a sensitive approach to the ecology is possible in mainstream politics and that Germany can do it all it can to solve conflicts peacefully", a reference to his refusal to send troops to the Iraq war.

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