World News : Merkel faces rout in state vote over austerity

DUESSELDORF, Germany (World News) - Angela Merkel's conservatives looked set for a heavy election loss in Germany's most populous state on Sunday that could give the left momentum before next year's federal election and fuel criticism of the chancellor's European austerity drive.

North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), an industrial state in western Germany with an economy and population roughly the size of the Netherlands, has a history of influencing national politics.

First exit polls were due at 1600 GMT and were expected to show Hannelore Kraft of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) trouncing her Christian Democrat (CDU) rival Norbert Roettgen, who is Merkel's environment minister.

"The SPD will get back in," said Helmut Krah, a voter in the NRW capital Duesseldorf who was window-shopping with his wife on the elegant Koenigsallee. "I'm voting for them not because they are good but because the others are so bad."

The vote is likely to bolster SPD fortunes nationwide and make Merkel, Germany's most popular politician, look politically vulnerable for the first time in a long while.

Opinion polls suggest that Kraft, who has run a fragile minority government with the Greens for two years, has won over voters by promising a go-slowly approach to cutting NRW's 180-billion-euro ($ 233 billion) debt, dodging accusations of fiscal mismanagement by the CDU.

"When you have worked hard, it's a good feeling when the day of the election comes," Kraft told reporters after voting.

A decisive victory for the SPD would be seen by many as a double defeat for the chancellor: NRW would be rejecting her party and the fiscal discipline she has forced on heavily indebted euro zone countries such as Greece.

Elections in the last few weeks in Greece, France and Italy have spotlighted a growing backlash against austerity.

Roettgen has declared the NRW vote a referendum on Merkel's European debt policies. "The election on Sund ay also serves to finally give our chancellor full support from Duesseldorf ... for her national and European policies," he told a crowd of 2,000 at a campaign rally on Friday.

Other conservative leaders have distanced themselves from Roettgen and pollsters say a strong majority of Germans still support Merkel's insistence on fiscal discipline in Europe, even if they do not want as much austerity at home.

HARBINGER OF CHANGE?

NRW, home to one in six German voters, is a microcosm of Germany and changes in coalitions there have presaged change for national governments. In 2005, the CDU led a centre-right coalition there to power four months before Merkel was elected at the head of the same alliance in Berlin.

The latest poll, released on Friday, put the SPD on 38 percent and the Greens on 11 percent, well ahead of the CDU and t heir preferred Free Democrat (FDP) coalition allies.

The CDU is polling 33 percent, which would be its worst result in NRW, and the pro-business FDP looks set to get just 5 percent. In the last NRW election in 2010, the SPD was just behind the CDU.

The big question is whether or not the SPD will get enough for a majority coalition with the Greens.

"I am not sure the SPD will have such a big win because politics has become so splintered and getting a majority is difficult," said one SPD supporter, Jana, after voting in Duesseldorf's historic centre, which was bustling with people eating and drinking in the spring sunshine.

"I think it will be a disaster for Roettgen," said a 29-year-old architect, who did not want to give her name. "But it's not a threat to Merkel. She is so strong at federal level in her position as chancellor. "

The upstart Pirate Party, whose platform is based on internet freedom and more direct participation in politics, was polling at 8 percent and looked set to enter its fourth regional parliament in a row.

Leaders of the FDP, junior partners in Merkel's centre-right coalition in Berlin, have sent signals that they might be open to a coalition with the SPD and the Greens.

"With the FDP and SPD, a performance-oriented party and a party focused mostly on social justice would rule together - surely it would be ideal if these two fundamental views came together," Wolfgang Kubicki, leader of the FDP in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Were a similar coalition to come together at the national level in 2013, it could doom Merkel's hopes of a third term.