Rightists making themselves unelectable

By Paul Taylor

LONDON (Reuters): Conservative opposition parties in Europe's three leading nations -- Britain, Germany and France -- are in danger of making themselves unelectable due to poor leadership, internal feuding, sleaze or a policy deficit.

France's fractured Right paid the price for its divisions in municipal elections on Sunday, losing control of Paris city hall -- President Jacques Chirac's long-time freedom -- for the first time since 1871, and handing second city Lyon to the governing Socialist-led Left as well.

But the Right's gains in other provincial cities where it was united suggest it could still win next year's presidential and parliamentary elections if it can stop tearing itself apart.

Britain's Conservative party faces another probable drubbing in a general election expected in May, partly because it has embraced Euro-skeptical policies outside the mainstream.

Germany's Christian Democrats, laid low by a funding scandal involving ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl and riven by rivalry among his pale successors, appear to have little chance of unseating Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder next year.

Polls suggest the CDU will fare badly in state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg next Sunday.

By contrast, Italy's conservatives under the firm leadership of tycoon Silvio Berlusconi seem to be dodging those pitfalls and are ahead in the polls in their drive to oust a center-left government in a May general election.

And Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar won re-election easily last year by occupying the center ground with his Popular Party and providing sure-footed economic leadership.

"As ideological differences have disappeared, personalities and the quality of leadership have come to matter immensely," Prof. William Wallace, European politics specialist at the London School of Economics.

Where Europe's conservatives are floundering, it is partly because center-left governments can boast healthy economic growth and falling unemployment, and have adopted some traditional right-of-center policies.

In Britain, France and Germany, the center-left has managed to embody a new modernizing generation, advancing such themes as multiculturalism, gender parity and sexual tolerance.

In some places, rightist parties have not been out of power long enough for voters to forget their shortcomings in office.

Wallace said some had succumbed to the "Goldwater syndrome" -- adopting policies popular with grassroots activists but out of touch with mainstream voters. The phenomenon is named after 1964 U.S. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his finance minister, Gordon Brown, miss no opportunity to tell voters that Labour is now the party of "economic competence".

British voters recall the sleaze, feuding over Europe, weak leadership and failing public services that led to the landslide defeat of John Major's last Conservative government in 1997.

In France, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's "plural left" government, elected the same year, has cut unemployment by one million, restored public finances and privatised more than its conservative predecessors under Alain Juppe.

After a shaky start in 1998, Schroeder has broken Germany's political logjam by reforming taxation and the armed forces and moving to overhaul pensions.

Over the last decade, policy gaps between government and opposition in most European countries have narrowed to the point where elections are often determined more by what the Germans call Regierungsfaehigkeit -- fitness to govern.

To be seen as fit to govern, a party needs a plausible leader, a semblance of unity and integrity, and policies that do not deeply offend the business community or the European Union.

Britain's Conservatives seem to fail all those tests. Polls show few voters take William Hague seriously as a potential prime minister.

Defying most business leaders, Hague opposes joining the single European currency and vows to renegotiate the EU's Nice Treaty and other agreements to restore more power to Britain.

In a speech that many commentators said highlighted the Conservatives' unelectability, he warned this month that Britain would be "a foreign country" taking orders from Brussels after four more years of Labour rule.

His party remains divided over Europe, with elder statesmen Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine barely concealing their contempt for Hague's lurch to the Euro-skeptical right.

Paradoxically, pollsters say some policies can make parties unelectable even if opinion polls show the ideas are popular with a majority of the electorate.

Labor's support for unilateral nuclear disarmament and British withdrawal from the EU in 1983 was a case in point. The Conservatives' hostility to the EU could be a similar example.

The French Right's problems are about personalities rather than policy, although it too is split between European federalists, pro-EU nationalists and outright Euro-sceptics.

The Paris defeat was a blow to Chirac's hopes of winning re- election next year, when he is expected to face Jospin, with whom he has "cohabited" uneasily in power since 1997.

As mayor of the capital from 1977 until 1995, Chirac ran his political machine out of city hall. Now his opponents are well placed to use it to highlight scandals dating back to his rule.

While Chirac looks jaded, most analysts see no plausible alternative conservative candidate, although pro-European centrist Francois Bayrou, free marketeer Alain Madelin and veteran Euro-skeptic Charles Pasqua may run against him, potentially weakening his re-election bid.

Germany's conservatives face a potential three-way contest to challenge Schroeder next year but unless the chancellor makes major blunders, the right looks unelectable.

CDU chief Angela Merkel, parliamentary leader Friedrich Merz and Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber all have drawbacks.

While some regional CDU leaders have toyed with populist themes -- running a disastrous anti-immigration campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia last year -- the party seems to lack any strong policy line.

"They lack issues, catchy ideas that would make the number of CDU supporters in the year before the federal election as the number of undecided voters," wrote commentator Karl Feldmeyer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.