In the midst of a scandal, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) Thursday lined up its would-be ministerial team for the September general election, hoping to close the gap on coalition partners under Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to dpa. The centre-left SPD's top candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is trailing Merkel in the popularity polls by some 40 percentage points, presented his team including ten female shadow ministers to the media following a party event at Potsdam, outside Berlin. Significantly absent was serving Health Minister Ulla Schmidt, who has fallen from grace following a row over her use of a ministerial car whilst on holiday in Spain last week. All other SPD ministers currently in the coalition government with Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and its smaller Bavarian sister party, were in the new line-up, including Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck. Steinmeier, the foreign minister now gunning for Merkel's seat in the Chancellery, also brought new faces into view not previously known in federal-level politics, such as 35-year-old Manuela Schwesig, currently the welfare minister for the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Steinmeier on Wednesday had said his team stood for "dynamism and departure," adding that the SPD had "not only the better heads, but also the better ideas," to move Germany forward. Other top-job candidates include Andrea Nahles, 39, who would become the education minister, and serving party general secretary Hubertus Heil, who would gain a junior post responsible for media. The SPD would in theory draw on the list if they were to receive enough votes in the September 27 general election to form a government, most likely with another party. However with the SPD forecast on Wednesday by poll-company Forsa to gain some 23 per cent in the election, it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will be in government at all. Merkel's Christian Union and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) polled 38 per cent and 13 per cent respectively, which would give them the right to form a so-called "middle-class majority," without the SPD. The SPD has been hurt by the last week's "limousine affair," in which Ulla Schmidt had to admit that she ordered her official Mercedes be driven thousands of kilometres for a minor political function on the Costa Blanca. The issue came to light when the car, which has since reappeared, was stolen. On Thursday, Lower Saxony SPD figure Wolfgang Juettner blasted the party's leadership for not sufficiently defending Schmidt or managing the media onslaught. Juettner regretted that Schmidt, seen as a capable minister, was now out of the SPD's line-up because of a minor incident. "Sometimes in Germany we have debates that get us laughed at abroad," he told the NDR radio station. The SPD is Germany's oldest political party, and has evolved from its 19th century roots as a socialist working-class party to a democratic social-market-economy advocate today.
