Little has gone right for Germany’s Social Democratic (SPD) Government in the past year or so for its beleaguered Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. Unemployment still remains at its highest level since the Weimar Republic, with more than five million Germans out of work. Attempts to force through drastic changes in social security benefits have met strong resistance within the ruling party and from a sceptical public. Industry, caught between militant unions and the very high costs of social benefits, is furious at the recent comparison by the SPD chairman of businessmen to locusts. And weary voters have handed the Government one defeat after another in regional elections. The SPD, which ruled eleven of the sixteen Länder in 1999, now holds power in only five.

The Government now looks set to suffer its greatest rebuff yet. The SPD and the Greens, their partners in the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, are likely to be defeated in the state election tomorrow. If they lose, Herr Schröder will find it hard to recover from the blow. The industrial heartland of Germany, by far the largest Land, has been an SPD stronghold for the past 39 years. Its rebuff would be an indictment of a party that is riven with internal disagreement, deeply unpopular among core voters and seemingly certain to lose the general election next year.

In many respects Herr Schröder has only himself to blame. Of late, he has fought hard for the comprehensive fourth round of benefit cuts proposed by the Harz IV labour reform commission. But his engagement was too little and too tardy. And by the time Herr Schröder was ready to take on the dinosaurs in the SPD, he had already surrendered control of the party to the unreformed Left. Indeed, he has never had full command since he became Chancellor — a fatal weakness in stamping his authority not only on his party but on a coalition that was already forced to compromise with the Greens, its junior partners. His decision to relinquish the party chairmanship last year, trumpeted as a “new beginning” to allow him to concentrate on running the Government, also reintroduced a confusion of authority that has come back to haunt him in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Franz Mütefering, the new chairman, attempting to woo back voters there worried by the effects of globalisation on jobs, compared hedge funds and foreign investors to “a swarm of locusts” grazing on underpriced businesses. This set off a storm of protest, not just from industry worried by the insult to investors, but among many who saw anti-Semitic overtones in comparisons with insects.

The SPD has not learnt the economic lesson. Its childish bashing of capitalism will not win back the jobless. And the opposition Christian Democrats, under the leadership of Angela Merkel, has put forward a robust, job-creating message that has won plaudits for her and her party. She knows that if her party wins tomorrow, and the success is repeated next year, Germany will at last have a government capable of championing necessary reforms.