. Try as he might by criss-crossing the country in a final whirl of campaign stops, Kohl has failed to close the gap on his Social Democrat (SPD) challenger Gerhard Schroeder. Kohl dismisses opinion polls which show his Christian Democrats between three and seven points adrift of Schroeder‘s SPD. „This election will be decided in the last three weeks,“ the 68-year-old chancellor said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. But it is virtually impossible to find a pollster who thinks Kohl can convince Germany‘s 60 million voters to return him for a record fifth term on September 27. For many Germans record unemployment, high taxes, an increasingly unaffordable welfare state and sputtering economic recovery cloud the earlier diplomatic and political achievements of Kohl‘s 16 years at the helm. „Around two thirds of voters agree with a Kohl must go mood,“ said pollster Dieter Roth of Electoral Research Group. Kohl‘s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has picked up a few points in some surveys in recent months. Kohl has been written off before but by this stage in the 1994 campaign, when the economy was faring worse than now, he had closed the gap on SPD challenger Rudolf Scharping. This time he faces a more popular and telegenic opponent in the 54-year-old Schroeder, whose style and emphasis on the new centre of German politics has brought superficial comparisons with Britain‘s Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Schroeder beat out Bonn-insider and SPD chairman Oskar Lafontaine for the party nomination in March after a resounding election victory in his home state of Lower Saxony. But Germany‘s voting system makes an outright Schroeder victory almost impossible. That gives a whole raft of tiny parties ranging from neo-Nazis to reformed communists a potential voice in determining who will steer Europe‘s economic locomotive into the next millennium. Schroeder‘s likeliest government partners are the Alliance 90/Greens, a leftist, ecologist grouping who draw support mainly among the urban young. If the election is close, this Red-Green alliance might depend upon the tacit support of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the heirs of the rulers of the former communist east Germany. Polls show the PDS could scrape back into the Bundestag (lower house), partly because Kohl is so unpopular in the five eastern states where unemployment is double that in the west. The closeness of the race has worried not only many within the CDU but also its coalition partners. The CDU‘s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has to face voters in a state election on September 13, two weeks before the national poll.