GERMANY: Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has attacked the "malicious" suggestion from his conservative rival, Mr Edmund Stoiber, that by letting unemployment rise above five million, he was helping the rise of neo-Nazis.
The Chancellor let fly at Mr Stoiber's "orgy of insults" yesterday, saying that the Bavarian leader, who narrowly lost the 2002 general election, was "whistling in the dark".
"We are dealing with a man who obviously hasn't come to terms with the fact that he will never achieve the kind of importance he thought he would reach on an international and national level," said Mr Schröder to cheering supporters at a rally in Cologne yesterday.
He attacked Mr Stoiber's comparison of current unemployment levels to the mass unemployment of Weimar Germany as "unhistorical and senseless".
Mr Stoiber struck back yesterday at the Christian Social Union (CSU) traditional Ash Wednesday rally in Passau in northern Bavaria. "With his 110 foreign trips, Mr Schröder has even surpassed the Pope.
"But when it comes to Germany's biggest problem, mass unemployment, the government follows the three-monkey principle: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," he said, urging the Chancellor to "pack his suitcase and resign".
Mr Stoiber said at the weekend that "we are facing a situation that Germany hasn't faced since 1932".
But the Chancellor's biting sarcasm appeared to have hit home yesterday: Mr Stoiber moderated his tone from the weekend, saying yesterday he "didn't feel the need to resort to cheap polemic".
"Unemployment is of course not the only but a dangerous breeding ground for extremists," he said.
The row began when MPs of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in the Saxon state parliament in Dresden refused to participate in observing a minute's silence for Holocaust victims. The party plans to steal the show at Sunday's 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, which the NPD describes as a "bombing holocaust".
Last week Mr Schröder told the visiting US Secretary of State, Dr Condoleezza Rice, that Berlin would provide additional help for rebuilding civil structures in Iraq as well as continue to train Iraqi soldiers and police in the United Arab Emirates.
"But I told our American friends clearly there is a line which I don't even think about crossing. German soldiers will not be in Iraq as long as we are in power," he said to applause.