“I don’t know what he wants any more,” says Klaus Schwaene outside Brunswick’s town hall building, the Neustadtrathaus. “He’s right on the Iraq war but has changed his mind on everything else.”

At 66, Herr Schwaene, a retired civil servant, is old enough to remember how the building behind him was smashed by Allied bombs in the Second World War. Even the most embittered conservative critics of the Chancellor share his distrust of a pre-emptive war against Baghdad.

Yet the anti-war sentiment does not look strong enough to shield the Chancellor against an electoral disaster tomorrow. If the Chancellor’s pacifism was tactical — it certainly helped him to a narrow victory in the general election five months ago — then it was ultimately the wrong priority. The regional elections tomorrow, in Lower Saxony and Hesse, are about unemployment, education, pensions and neighbourhood crime.

The elections are, however, about the Chancellor too; about the rapidly deteriorating faith in the style and substance of his Government.

In Lower Saxony, Sigmar Gabriel, the incumbent Social Democratic Prime Minister, was once regarded as the Chancellor’s crown prince. Now the bulky 43-year-old trails by 12 per cent in the opinion polls and is clearly embarrassed when the Chancellor appears on the stump. In Hesse, Roland Koch, the ruling Christian Democrat Prime Minister, looks set to romp home, positioning himself as a future rival to the Chancellor.

If Herr Gabriel goes, the Chancellor’s authority will quickly start to unravel. Lower Saxony is the Chancellor’s provisional homeland. He grew up there, became its Prime Minister, bought his home in the capital, Hanover.

Yet few people in Brunswick can remember seeing the Chancellor on the election bus in recent weeks. Since his speech in nearby Goslar a week ago, where he clearly stated his opposition to an Iraq war, he has been notable by his absence.

Herr Gabriel is, of course, everywhere. In Goslar, his home town, his mother sat in the front row cheering him on, but she could soon be in a minority. Little wonder then that he is trying to distance himself from his patron.

The Chancellor’s Finance Minister, he says to loud applause, is practising voodoo economics if he believes that Germany’s budget can really be balanced by 2006. Taxes have to be cut.

Herr Gabriel and his 43-year-old Christian Democratic rival Christian Wulff are a new type of politician, less hungry for power than the 1968 student rebel generation which sets the governing tone in Germany. Herr Gabriel has softer contours than Herr Schröder, yet even Social Democrats outside his region speak of him as a future leader of the party, and of Germany. Even if he loses tomorrow he will remain in the political game: the champion of a generation waiting for the Schröder team to move on.

If Herr Gabriel loses in Lower Saxony and Herr Koch wins in Hesse, the Chancellor will be a hostage to the Christian Democrats. They can, through their thumping majority in the upper house, dictate the terms of German politics.

The result: the Chancellor can use his new dependency to push through pro-business reforms and override the critics in the union movement and within the left wing of his party. That would bring him closer to his reformist protégé Herr Gabriel, so obviously impatient with the zig-zag policy-making in Berlin.

The Chancellor’s strategy could be described as creative destruction: the worse it gets, the more interesting are his political options. A grand coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is edging ever closer. In the final analysis, though, the Chancellor is weakening his party.

It will be kept from open revolt by the sympathy for the Chancellor’s anti-war rhetoric. But he cannot win on Iraq. If France votes for war in the UN Security Council, Germany will look very lonely indeed. Short war, long war: Germany will share no credit in the outcome.

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