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Small parties seek election role
By CNN's Stephanie Halasz
BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- With the two major party candidates for chancellor in a virtual dead heat less than a week before the election, the Free Democrats -- the traditional kingmakers of German politics -- are leaving their options open. The FDP has been on the sidelines the past four years after being a coalition partner in most of Germany's postwar governments. Only once since 1949 has a single party won an outright majority in Germany's lower house of parliament. A campaign poster this year portrays the FDP as a fit, tough running shoe in a race with Schroeder's worn-out Social Democrat slipper and an equally exhausted-looking shoe representing Stoiber's conservative Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union alliance. "This poster shows we are running as an independent party, as someone who sets the speed," says the FDP's Guido Westerwelle.
"We think that the Social Democrats as well as the conservatives could use us." Immediately after election results are known, the parties who have a chance of forming a majority in parliament hold coalition talks and try to hammer out a compromise that will allow them to rule together -- and decide who gets what cabinet seats. Last time, the post of foreign ministrer went to popular Green Party leader Joschka Fischer. This year, polls show the Greens and their coalition partner, Schroeder's SPD, stand a chance of staying in office. Although two dozen parties have fielded candidates in Sunday's parliamentary elections, pollsters say only six of them have a real chance of garnering the minimum 5 percent of the vote needed to get into parliament. Most don't even have a candidate for chancellor. Sandra Brunner is running under the banner of the Party of Democratic Socialism --- successor to East Germany's old Communist Party. "Many in east Germany have to work more and get less money than in the west. And that is why I think the PDS is needed in the next German parliament," Brunner says. Observers say Brunner's party could win enough seats again to play a spoiler's role in the major parties' efforts to form a coalition. But there's no chance the PDS and Stoiber's conservatives would cooperate. And Schroeder says he will not accept PDS votes in order to remain chancellor.
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