Germany's conservatives have kicked off their election campaign with an explicit appeal to the middle-class.

"We want to relieve the burden on the middle of society," said Christian Democratic Union (CDU) general secretary, Ronald Pofalla, at the opening of the party conference in Berlin on Monday.

Pofalla attacked his party's main rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD), accusing them of pursuing a strategy of "division and envy."

"We want to reduce taxes, the SPD wants to raise them. We will make this abundantly clear over the next three months," he said.

The CDU and its Bavarian sister party the CSU agreed at the weekend that tax cuts should be the cornerstone of their re-election campaign.

The main policy would be a modest cut in the lowest income tax bracket from 14 to 12 percent.

Dissent in the ranks

But there have been opposing voices among the conservatives. Two CDU state premiers have openly advocated an increase in certain taxes, such as value added tax, to offset the blowout in public expenditures caused by the global economic downturn.

So it was with an eye to the dissenters that Chancellor Merkel called for party unity when she took to the stage at the party conference, to the drawn-out applause of over 750 party deputies.

"Sometimes a bit of lateral thinking is needed," she said, in a veiled reference to her party's internal tax-debate, "but we've thought for long enough."

Merkel vowed, if re-elected, not to raise value added tax during the next term of office, but didn't elaborate on how her tax-cuts would be financed or when they would be introduced.

She also advocated her party's goal of winning enough votes to ditch the SPD as coalition partner in favour of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP).

"We have the power to make our country stronger than it was before. We have the power to promote growth ... and we say, we can best do this with a different coalition partner," she said.

Criticism from left and right

The Social Democrats' secretary-general, Hubertus Heil, said the CDU's agenda "was not credible."

He warned that "Merkel is either trying to pull the wool over the voter's eyes, or there really is no sound concept behind the whole thing."

Heil said that the CDU's election program did not contain ideas on how to shape the country's future. With the country's budget set for a record deficit, any promise to lower taxes was simply "unrealistic."

Criticism also came from the FDP - normally a strong advocate for tax cuts.

The party's Juergen Koppelin criticized the plans as "very vague and non-binding", calling them "spineless" for not including a timetable to introduce the tax cuts. But FDP leader, Guido Westerwelle, welcomed the conservatives' overtures to form a coalition, calling their program a "good basis" for working together.

In contrast, the Greens' Claudia Roth, also with an eye on possible coalition talks, said the conservatives' platform was looking "very distant from us."

The latest opinion poll puts the conservatives on 35 percent of the vote. Right now, that would be just enough to win government with the FDP, who are polling 15 percent of the vote.

The center-left SPD, the minority party in Merkel's government, still hopes to retain power in a second grand coalition. But its goal of forming government with the Greens seems increasingly unlikely. The two parties are currently polling 24 and 15 percent respectively.

nw/dpa/AP
Editor: Michael Lawton