BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives saw their lead over the main centre-left opposition party crumble in the sharpest one-week shift in German voter sentiment in seven years, an opinion poll showed on Sunday.

An eight percentage point lead by Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) over the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) fell to just two points during a week that saw the chancellor face pressure over the euro crisis and domestic turmoil, according to the Emnid poll.

One party leader said the conservatives were also suffering from the after effects of a trouncing in a regional election on May 13 – though it was still too early to say whether the shift would have any impact on the next parliamentary vote, scheduled for 2013.

Support for the CDU and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), fell three points to a seven-month low of 32 percent during the week up to May 23, according to the poll for Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Support for the centre-left opposition Social Democrats rose three points to a five-month high of 30 percent over the same period, the survey found.

Merkel’s conservatives had held a comfortable advantage over the SPD in polls since crushing the centre-left party in the last parliamentary election in 2009. The current two-point lead is the narrowest since October 2011.

The results came against a backdrop of rising pressure on Merkel – from international partners and from opposition parties at home – to take bolder steps to boost growth in stricken euro zone members like Greece and Spain.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A top ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives appealed to the opposition Social Democrats and Greens on Sunday to refrain from “playing political games” and back the government to endorse Europe’s new fiscal pact and permanent bailout fund.

The SPD and their allies the Greens – making common cause with France’s new Socialist President Francois Hollande and some other EU leaders – say the pact must be accompanied by new measures to promote growth and investment in Europe.

Hermann Groehe, Merkel’s top deputy in the Christian Democrats party (CDU), said in a radio interview on Sunday it was important for Germany to send a signal across Europe that it is fully committed to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Merkel needs SPD support in the two houses of parliament to secure ratification of the fiscal pact agreed among EU leaders that will impose tougher budgetary rules.

A two-thirds majority is needed because the fiscal pact, seen as the centerpiece of Europe’s drive to overcome its debt crisis and recover market confidence, affects the constitution and national sovereignty.

“There is no room in this question for playing political games,” Groehe told Deutschlandfunk radio. “It would be good if we in Germany, as the anchor of stability in Europe, send out a signal that stability and solidarity belong together.”

The government and opposition parties have been edging nearer a compromise to pave the way for parliamentary approval of the new fiscal pact and permanent bailout fund.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.

Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs.

“Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,” Allnoch told Reuters. “Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.”

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

BERLIN, May 26 (Reuters) – Germany will not “pour money into a bottomless pit” and patience with Greece is growing thin ahead of a new election in the Mediterranean country, a conservative member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet was quoted on Saturday as saying.

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper that Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the biggest contributor to rescue efforts, is glad to help Greece help itself but expects it to honour its agreements.

“We’re not willing to pour money into a bottomless pit,” he told the newspaper.

“Anyone who wants to see help and solidarity from us has to accept that we expect from that country a certain amount of seriousness and a certain amount of reasonableness.”

Friedrich, who has long been a hardliner in Merkel’s cabinet on Greece, became the first German minister in February to openly call for the country to leave the euro zone.

While his latest comments appear to be aimed at placating Germans who are increasingly anxious about the Greek situation, they are likely to reopen old wounds with Athens.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble also called Greece “a bottomless pit” in February but after being villanised in Athens has since refrained from using the term.

BERLIN, May 20 (Reuters) – A record-breaking pay deal will give millions of German workers their biggest rise in wages in two decades, boost consumption in Europe’s biggest economy and help towards adjusting the regional imbalances that have caused severe tensions within the euro zone, analysts said on Sunday.

Germany’s largest industrial union IG Metall agreed to a 4.3-percent pay rise from employers just before dawn on Saturday, giving the 3.6 million car and engineering industry workers their biggest wage increase since a 5.4 percent deal in 1992.

The eye-catching 4.3 percent increase in the headline number will cover the 12 months from May 1 to April 30, 2013, union officials said. The agreement that ends a series of disruptive strikes takes effect from April 1, 2012 but will encompass a 13-month period. Workers will get no raise for April 2012.

The highest wage increase in two decades was agreed after German political leaders broke a long-standing, self-imposed taboo of staying out of wage talks and instead repeatedly called for strong pay rises.

Low wage growth in Germany has been identified as a source of danger in the euro zone with economists blaming it for causing imbalances that have exacerbated the sovereign debt crisis. Nominal wage growth in Germany was 1 percent on average from 2007 compared to 2.7 percent in the combined euro zone.

“I think it is a good agreement that will contribute to the rebalancing in the euro area,” said Guntram Wolff, deputy director of EU policy think tank Bruegel in Brussels, after the breakthrough in the talks being closely watched across Europe.

Even though wages in the crisis-hit euro zone periphery are falling, German workers this year are savouring the benefits of a robust economy, a healthy labour market and the unusual verbal backing for higher wages from political leaders, such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble who earlier in May said German wages should grow faster than in the rest of Europe.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Greek President Karolos Papoulias what he thought of the idea of holding a referendum on Greek membership in the euro but did not push it, a journalist who said he overheard their conversation wrote on Saturday.

A Greek government spokesman said Merkel raised the idea in a telephone call on Friday but Berlin swiftly denied that.

The incident reignited anti-Merkel sentiment in debt-laden Greece where many accuse the German leader of exacerbating the crisis by being slow to act and then demanding austerity measures that are too tough.

A Merkel spokeswoman said on Saturday there was “no truth to reports” the German leader urged Greece to hold a referendum but declined to give details of what had been discussed.

Paul Ronzheimer, a reporter with Germany’s Bild newspaper, wrote on Saturday that he was in the same room as Papoulias in Athens just as he took the call from Merkel.

Ronzheimer said he heard Papoulias speaking fluent German to Merkel as they discussed the idea. He did not specify if he had overheard Merkel’s side of the conversation as well.

“She wanted to talk to him about a possible referendum on the euro – the idea came up a few days ago from a meeting of European Union finance ministers,” wrote Ronzheimer, who was accompanying European Parliament President Martin Schulz to the meeting with Papoulias, in a report published on Saturday.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Political spouses sometimes provide a spot of glamour. Then there is Joachim Sauer, a professor of theoretical chemistry.

Sauer is the husband of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, arguably the world’s most powerful woman. He never speaks to the media and only rarely appears in public with his wife. He skipped her inauguration in 2005, drawing media wrath for watching the event on TV at his Berlin university. A German newspaper once said he was as “invisible as a molecule.” His surname means “angry” or “sour.”

He has made headlines for his frugality, too. In April, he flew alone on a budget airline to Italy, where he and Merkel were to holiday, instead of paying a token fee to accompany her on a government jet, according to German media reports.

As his wife stands in the international klieg lights amid her long-running battle to tame the euro-zone’s economic crisis, Sauer, 63, seems happy to remain unknown outside his field.

“Thanks for your interest,” he emailed, declining an interview request. The government and Merkel’s spokesman also declined to comment.

Friends and associates say the German media have Sauer all wrong. They describe not a grump, but rather a down-to-earth man with a dry sense of humor. They say his roots in a small mining town behind the Iron Curtain in the former East Germany underpin a grounded attitude that makes him a valuable sounding board for a spouse with one of Europe’s toughest jobs.

“The clichés that circulate in the German media about Joachim Sauer are a total fallacy,” says Reinhold Messner, a renowned mountain climber who has hiked with Sauer and Merkel in the Alps. “The fact is that he’s his own man. He’s witty, he’s profound, he can be incredibly funny, and he’s an extremely bright guy. He’s an ideal counterpart to the Chancellor.”

BERLIN, May 6 (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives were in danger of being ousted from power in another German state on Sunday after the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) said they wanted to form a three-way coalition with two smaller centre-left parties.

The Christian Democrats’ (CDU) vote fell to 31 percent, their worst result in the state since 1950, but they were still just the largest party in the rural region between the Baltic and North Seas, a projection by Germany’s ARD TV network showed.

The SPD, which won 29.9 percent in the northernmost state, said it wanted to form a coalition with the Greens and South Schleswig Party (SSW) that represents the Danish majority. The three parties would have 35 seats in the 69-seat state assembly.

Merkel’s conservatives have been voted out of power in three states in the last two years. If knocked out in the traditionally conservative region of Schleswig-Holstein the CDU would rule just seven of Germany’s 16 states ahead of the 2013 federal election, when Merkel is seeking a third term.

“She’ll probably lose another state premier and this will make things harder for her re-election campaign,” said Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.

“She can’t be satisfied about the performance of her centre-right coalition.”

The chancellor’s resolute stance through the drama of the euro zone crisis has left her personal popularity intact. But her national centre-right coalition has looked in jeopardy after a slump support for her junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP).

BERLIN (Reuters) – Angela Merkel is against economic stimulus programmes to boost growth in Europe but is open to the idea of strengthening the European Investment Bank (EIB), the German chancellor was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper to appear on Wednesday, Merkel said that she did not believe growth could only be spurred by costly government stimulus measures.

“It’s important that we get away from the idea that it always costs money to get economic growth,” Merkel said, according to an advance excerpt from the interview.

“Sustainable growth is based more than that on education and research, and on the innovative strength of small and medium sized companies.”

Germany, which pulled its economy out of a tailspin in 2008/09 with a record 81-billion-euro stimulus programme, has led calls for euro zone governments to continue to focus economic policy tightly on austerity measures as the region’s current crisis has worsened.

But with voters in many countries becoming increasingly disillusioned with successive waves of belt-tightening, pressure for pro-active growth initiatives is growing.

In France, presidential election frontrunner Francois Hollande, wants to recast the euro zone’s deficit-constraining fiscal pact if he wins Sunday’s second-round vote and has urged the European Central Bank to do more to stimulate growth.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German labor leaders urged May Day demonstrators on Tuesday to fight for big pay rises after a decade of restraint that had seen wages in crisis-hit southern Euro zone nations soar.

The head of the powerful IG-Metall union, demanding a 6.5 percent rise, described an offer of 3 percent over 14 months as a farce. From Hamburg in the north to Stuttgaqrt in the south, the mood of members rallying in sunny weather under red union flags, banging drums and blowing whistles, was combative.

“If we don’t have a result (from talks) by Pentecost, then there will be a strike ballot and strike,” said Berthold Huber, referring to the May 27/28 holiday.

In Berlin, thousands marched through the government quarter to hear speeches at the central Brandenburg gate near the Reichstag parliament building. One brightly colored truck carried a banner reading: “It’s time to cough up the money.”

IG Metall, with a membership of 3.6 million, held warning strikes at the weekend and is planning more for Wednesday in Germany’s industrial heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia.

If the major unions achieved pay rises anything near their demands, pressure for a policy response would grow.

There are signs German policymakers are already starting to worry about inflation, although it continues anchored around two percent. Last week, Economy Minister Philipp Roesler said the European Central Bank should refocus on price stability.