Silke Müller has her mind fixed on one goal as Sunday’s parliamentary election approaches: She is determined to help the country’s Union opposition parties and their top candidate, Edmund Stoiber, mine the wealth of votes up for grabs in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.

‘‘We think our chances are very good," said Mülller, a member of the Christian Democratic Union‘s campaign staff in the northwestern state.

But Wolfgang Clement, the Social Democrat who is the state’s premier, is doing his best to make Müller, Stoiber and the rest of the opposition fail. Throughout the campaign, he has been traveling around the state, criticizing the Bavarian premier who wants to unseat the country’s Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

To make his case during one speech, Clement pointed to the financial support the southern state received in past decades. ‘‘If we had not provided the Bavarians with 13 billion marks ($7.6 billion), they would still be running around in their lederhosen – minus their laptops, of course.

Party battle on western front

The focus of the two parties’ efforts is a state that has 13.3 million eligible voters, out of a national total of 61.2 million. Every fifth voter lives in the western state between the Rhine and Weser rivers. It is also a state whose government has been firmly in the hands of the Social Democrats since 1980 and whose voters turned their backs on the Christian Democrats in national elections in the 1960s and have not looked back since.

Nonetheless, the Christian Democrats are talking optimistically about their chances on Sunday. "It will be close,‘" the party’s national general secretary, Laurenz Meyer, said in a recent newspaper interview.

Müller agrees and bolsters such statements with hard numbers churned out during the local elections held in 1999. In those races, the Christian Democrats ended with 50.3 percent of the vote compared with 33.9 percent for the Social Democrats. As a result, she said, the Christian Democrats now hold a majority of the leading mayoral positions throughout the state.

Steadfast SPD allegiance

Despite such numbers, there seems to be just one problem for the Christian Democrats, no matter how often Müller and her staff send Stoiber on visits to companies, day-care centers and market squares around the state. The voters do not seem to be shaking off their allegiance to the Social Democrats.

According to one poll conducted in early September, the Social Democrats picked up 2 percentage points to reach 42 percent over the last polling period in August. The Christian Democrats, on the other hand, dropped 2 percentage points to 35 percent.

In the early spring, the Christian Democrats expected they would see support going in the other direction. The reason was a major contribution scandal that struck the Social Democrats in Cologne, one of the state’s biggest cities. The heart of the scandal was a total of 424,000 euro ($411,000) of undeclared contributions. Some members of the Cologne Social Democrats are thought to have given fake donation receipts to 38 members in an attempt to conceal the origins of the money.

The allegations set off a form of internecine infighting in the party. The Social Democrats eventually filed lawsuits against two former members of the Cologne branch who refused to identify donors and recipients of the falsified donation receipts. And the national party’s general secretary, Franz Müntefering, had to defend himself from accusations that he lied during questioning before the parliamentary committee investigating the scandal.

Focus on national leadership

But the mood seems to have shifted in the months that have passed since the allegations broke, pushing the issue deeper into voters’ memories. And Markus Gluch, a leader of the Cologne Social Democrats, says he thinks he knows why. "The TV debates (by the candidates), the floods in Eastern Germany, the potential war with Iraq, the efforts of the national party leadership, all of these things have helped the Social Democrats," Gluch said recently while handing out campaign literature as the early shift began at the Ford plant in the city.

The use of the party leadership has indeed played a prominent role in the Social Democrats’ efforts. According to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, the party has put up about 6,000 large posters throughout the state, reportedly as many as the Christian Democrats have used across the entire country. And the face that voters see the most is that of Chancellor Schröder, the man that some of the posters call "the modern chancellor for a modern country."

Come election day, though, party members plan to employ some active tactics to ensure that Schröder’s face is not just seen on the streets, but remembered in the polling booths. In the Duisburg area, for instance, 40 campaign workers will be calling 5,000 households to help prod voters to head off to the polls.