MERKEL'S TRIFECTA:

Turkish vote may throw Schröder lifeline (Roger Boyes, 9/15/05, Times of London)

AYFER DURUR is one of the most fashionable hairdressers in Berlin and a natural Christian Democratic voter — an entrepreneur worried about taxes, high labour costs and the sluggish economy.

However, the 38-year-old is going to vote for the Social Democrats — one of 600,000 Turkish Germans who could throw a lifeline to Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, if the general election on Sunday turns out to be a dead heat, as the latest opinion polls suggest.

“Will the Turks decide the election?” the mass-circulation Bild asked yesterday, a question regarded as provocative, even racist, by immigrants in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. They do, after all, have German citizenship and are not, as one greengrocer put it, “some kind of alien invaders”.

The German Right is poised to pull off an unbelievable electoral feat, losing the socialist, nationalist, and Turkish votes to the Left.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2005 8:04 PM