Schleswig-Holstein's conservative premier, Peter Harry Carstensen (CDU), said he saw no alternative after the Social Democrats (SPD) had refused to support the end of the grand coalition in a vote on Monday.

He has called a vote of confidence in his leadership for Thursday. If he loses that - as he intends - he will be able to call early elections, which he wants to see coincide with the national election on September 27. Elections would otherwise take place in May next year.

Signal for national politics

The collapse of the regional CDU/SPD coalition has been seen as a signal for the national mood, where politicians on both sides are distancing themselves from a similar coalition at the national level. That is unlikely to collapse before the election, but differences in policy between the two parties are becoming clearer.

Carstensen said last week that the coalition must end following months of conflict between him and the regional Social Democrat leader Ralf Stegner. The final straw came, he said, when Stegner refused to take joint responsibility for unpopular decisions, among them the decision to pay a substantial bonus to the head of the troubled regional state bank, HSH Nordbank.

However, Carstensen has now admitted that he did not tell the truth when he told parliament that Stegner had been involved in that decision.

Personal disappointment

Carstensen described the decision to dismiss the ministers as "extremely difficult for me personally." He told German television, "Everyone knows that I worked well with the ministers, and that they have worked fairly and conscientiously in the cabinet." Their tasks will be taken over by Christian Democrat ministers.

The four Social Democrats, who are required to leave their posts on Tuesday, refused to receive their dismissal documents, which were delivered to them on Monday evening. One of them, Ute Erdsieck-Rave, until now Education Minister and Carstensen's deputy, said she was "personally deeply disappointed," especially since Carstensen had not informed her personally of the move. "We are being treated as if we had stolen some silver spoons," she added.

If, as expected, Carstensen succeeds in losing the vote of confidence on Thursday, leading to elections in September, current opinion polls in the state suggest that the CDU will do worse than it did in 2005, but it will still be able to form a government with its preferred partner, the liberal FDP, who are expected to do better. On current showing, the SPD will suffer a disaster, with its share of the vote falling nearly 15 percent to 24 percent.

mll/dpa/AP/AFP
Editor: Neil King