Berliners head for crucial poll

Campaigning is intense ahead of Sunday's vote

BERLIN, Germany -- The residents of Berlin are preparing to go to the polls in a ballot seen as a test for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government ahead of next year's national elections.

For the first time since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, former East German communists in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) are reaching for power in the German capital.

The election was forced by the collapse in the summer of the ruling coalition between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

It is predicted that Sunday's poll could deliver a humiliation for the once-dominant conservative Christian Democrats.

Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit, the first openly gay mayor of a German metropolis, is the front-runner after a slick campaign.

The 48-year-old has promised the 2.4 million voters a "new beginning" after a decade of deepening economic trouble in the once-divided city.

But while polls predict that the Christian Democrats will slump to about 26 percent from more than 40 percent, and Wowereit will boost his party's share to about 36 percent from 22 percent, it may not be enough.

Wowereit hopes to rule together with the Green Party, but with the Greens stagnating at about 10 percent, he may need a third partner to govern, so the former communists could be invited on board.

Backed by Schroeder, who heads the Social Democrats, Wowereit has refused to rule out an alliance with the PDS, even though it has many former secret police officers as members and has been shunned at national level.

Wowereit is running against conservative businessman Frank Steffel, 35, and the charismatic Gregor Gysi, a Berlin lawyer who used to head the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism.

Gysi, a lawyer who is trying to reshape his party

Gysi, who has persistently denied accusations that he collaborated with the Stasi secret police as a lawyer in East Berlin, is a popular figure who is trying to recast his party as a potential powerbroker or governing partner.

But 80 percent of his party's rank and file are former members of the East German communist party.

Campaigning has been overshadowed by "events in America and then Afghanistan ... so that Berlin issues haven't had the prominence they deserved," Steffel said on Wednesday.

Following anthrax scares, city authorities have ordered ballot helpers to wear rubber gloves and face masks. Police will be on heightened alert.

Less than a year before national elections, the ballot is a crucial test for the Social Democrats and Greens.

Those two parties joined forces with the ex-communists in June to oust Berlin's long-standing Christian Democratic mayor in a city parliament vote after a sleaze scandal erupted at a city-controlled bank. Fresh elections then were called.

The scandal was the latest to damage the conservatives, already hurt by an earlier slush fund affair involving former Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Much of their campaign has focused on painting the ex-communists as closet Stalinists.