AFP - The Germans are threatening to inflict a blow Sunday to the conservative Angela Merkel and its nuclear policy in two regional elections that coincide with a worsening situation in Fukushima.
"The whole nuclear fuel," headlined the daily Welt am Sonntag, above articles on the latest developments of the disaster at the Chernobyl Japanese election day.
Saturday, some 250,000 people protested in the streets of nuclear fear, exacerbated by the accident in Fukushima, and request a stay of German reactors.
The information from Japan on Sunday were not likely to reassure voters with radioactivity "10 million times higher" than normal as measured in a water escaped from the reactor 2.
"On election day that shook the black-yellow coalition," headlined the tabloid Bild am Sonntag, referring to the colors of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
All polls indicate that the Christian Democrats (CDU) Chancellor Angela Merkel will lose power in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a prosperous Land of 10 million people in southwestern Germany who voted Conservative for 58 years .
In this Land which stand four atomic reactors, the Greens might even take the head of a regional government for the first time.
The Greens should also enter the regional parliament of Rhineland-Palatinate and emerge as partners of Government in Social Democratic (SPD) Kurt Beck at the helm for 17 years.
The departure of Ms. Merkel after the nuclear accident in Fukushima has angered voters.
The chancellor, who assured that the German plants were "the safest in the world," ordered the temporary shutdown of the seven oldest reactors of 17 and a review of security measures.
Five months earlier, the majority had voted to extend the life of the plants of twelve years on average, while a previous SPD-Green government had promised "the output of nuclear power" in 2020.
The volte-face of Mrs Merkel was seen as an electoral ploy.
A government minister has confirmed in a small committee that electoral considerations are not alien to this shift, according to leaks in the press this week.
The expected defeat in Baden-Württemberg will reduce the flexibility of the conservative-liberal coalition in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, without threatening the mandate of Ms. Merkel, which runs until 2013.
But Bild, the Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Liberal Westerwelle, plays his "destiny".
If the PDF is missing the two regional parliaments, he asked his chief of accounts that since the 2009 parliamentary election defeats and accumulates has not convinced the head of German diplomacy.
The failure of Germany to the UN during the vote on the resolution authorizing the use of force to protect civilians in Libya has increased voter confusion. For the first time since the war, Berlin was torn from its U.S. and European allies.
An anonymous source within the party, citing the Tagesspiegel, said that Mr.Brüderle government should resign if the Liberals do not sit in Rhineland-Palatinate, which he headed the federation FPD.
Some 10.8 million voters to the polls in both states. Polling stations close at 6:00 p.m. (1600 GMT) and first preliminary results are expected shortly thereafter.
