Her main rival, the SPD’s Martin Schulz, has said 13 May North Rhine-Westphalia vote will show who will triumph in September

Angela Merkel is not taking any chances. Despite being buoyed by the victory of the pro-EU Emmanuel Macron in France, as well as a surprise win by her Christian Democrats in north Germany the same day, the chancellor is scheduled to make no fewer than four appearances on the campaign trail before another crucial poll in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) this weekend.

The vote is the last test of the nation’s mood before the general election in September, in which Merkel will stand for the fourth time. The 13 million people eligible to cast their ballot in Germany’s industrial heartland on 14 May will offer the strongest indication yet as to whether Merkel can win, or whether the rival Social Democrats (SPD) might end her 11-year reign.

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The SPD has put all its store by Martin Schulz, the former president of the European parliament, who unexpectedly swept on to the German political stage in January. Last month he was voted in as leader of the party and he is its challenger to face Merkel. His arrival created a surge in support for the SPD, causing its poll ratings to shoot up to a 10-year high, on a par with those of Merkel’s conservative alliance.

There was widespread belief on both the left and right that Schulz had a good chance of ousting Merkel, who alongside the charismatic former bookshop owner had begun to look rather worn out, many commentators said.



But recently the so-called Schulz effekt appears to have waned and the party’s ratings have stagnated. Last month Merkel’s CDU beat the centre-left SPD by a surprisingly large margin in the small state of Saarland. Then last Sunday the northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, fell to the CDU.

Now the focus is on the traditional SPD stronghold of NRW, by far the biggest and most important state, and home to almost 18 million people – almost a quarter of all Germans.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schulz and Merkel in 2015. Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters

NRW has been run by the SPD minister-president, Hannelore Kraft, in a coalition with the Greens for the past five years. If that race also goes wrong for the SPD, it will be a disaster, signalling that the short-lived Schulz effekt may have run out of steam.

According to the latest polls, the days of the so-called red-green alliance in NRW appear to be numbered. The most likely outcome as predicted by political observers is a CDU-led grand coalition between it and the SPD – as currently rules the federal government in Berlin.

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The conservatives have focused their campaign on highlighting the state government’s failure to tackle a range of deficits in NRW. Labelled “the Greece of Germany”, it suffers from the highest level of child poverty in Germany, the biggest unemployment rate outside the former communist east, and has the country’s record for the worst traffic jams.

Its reputation for security has also been damaged after a series of events including the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne in 2015 and the authorities’ apparent shortcomings over the Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, an erstwhile resident who managed to slip out of the state and subsequently drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin last December, killing 12.



Attempts by NRW’s government to blame Merkel for the failings have lacked traction, not least because responsibility for everything from autobahns to schools lies with states.

Schulz is an inhabitant of NRW and has been central to the campaign, making more than 30 appearances. He also made the apparently bold prediction that whoever wins NRW would go on to become the strongest party on 24 September.

But experts are in full agreement with him. “Quantitively it is extremely important, because nowhere else will you see so many people go to the ballot box,” Karl Rudolf-Körte, a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told Deutschlandfunk radio. “Qualitatively it is important because frequently the competition between political parties on the national level is decided according to the constellation we get here in NRW”.



Six parties are likely to enter the NRW state parliament in Düsseldorf, including for the first time the rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is also expected to enter the Bundestag in four months’ time.



Nationally, this week the SPD stood at 27% (1.5 percentage points down) in a poll by INSA, while the CDU was up one point at 35%. AfD was on 10% (up one point), Die Linke on 10% (minus 0.5), the Greens on 7% (up 0.5), and the pro-business FDP was on 7%.

•This article was amended on 11 May to correct the date of the upcoming election to 14 May.