Mr Boring is facing a monumental battle

A green helicopter shot out of a bank of rain-sodden cloud and landed noisily on the shores of a lake that was once a giant open-cast coal mine.

Thickset men in suits talking into walkie-talkies leaped from the aircraft and propelled a portly, owlish man with a shock of white hair and thick glasses towards a gaggle of east Germans.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the man who aims to oust Chancellor Angela Merkel in next month's poll, strode with a resigned air towards the group hiding under umbrellas in the beer garden of a 19th-century villa in the once polluted east German town of Bitterfeld.

It was another stopover in the German Social Democratic Party's arduous campaign to make headway against seemingly irreversible odds in the run-up to this year's election and Steinmeier seemed to admit he was one of the reasons for his party's current difficulties.

His opening remarks to the small crowd conveyed the impression of someone staring into the jaws of ignominious defeat.

"You know people keep asking me how I manage to cope with opinion polls like these," he said with a forced smile. "Well, people should realise all the opinion polls are yesterday's polls and it's the future that concerns me. The election result is still wide open."

The onlookers applauded weakly amid the spattering rain.

It was a brave performance for a politician who has been described as "clinically boring" and whose attempt to become chancellor has been written off by the German media as the "strangest candidacy in postwar history".

Kicking off his election campaign a few months ago, Steinmeier, who is Foreign Minister in the ruling coalition, proved extraordinarily capable and hopes were high for a strong performance. But with less than six weeks to go before the September 27 poll, his party's popularity has plummeted to one of its lowest pre-election levels since World War II.

This week, his campaign suffered another serious setback with new and potentially damaging revelations about Ulla Schmidt, the Social Democrat Health Minister and key member of Steinmeier's election team, who was only recently recruited to try to shore up flagging support.

The German public had already reacted with horror to the disclosure last month that she had taken her official car on holiday to Spain, where it had been stolen.

But ministry files published on Wednesday showed that Schmidt had in fact used her €90,000 ($190,000) chauffeur-driven armoured S-class Mercedes on numerous holidays dating back to 2004 - and not reimbursed the taxpayer for any of the 4800km round trips.

An official government inquiry has been launched in an attempt to establish whether Schmidt abused her privileges as an MP, but her political opponents are already calling for her resignation.

Wolfgang Bosbach, the deputy leader of Merkel's parliamentary party, the Christian Democrats, said: "It was a fatal mistake by Steinmeier to take Ms Schmidt on to his election team."

Schmidt protested her innocence yesterday and said she had taken the armoured car to Spain for security reasons. She accused her conservative opponents of deliberately attacking her because they feared having their plans to introduce more private healthcare exposed.

The Schmidt affair is unlikely to improve the Social Democrats' standing in the opinion polls, which show support for the party hovering around 20 per cent, while backing for Merkel's conservatives remains at 38 per cent.

When it comes to personal popularity, the disparity is even greater. More than 60 per cent of Germans would vote for Merkel if she could be directly elected as chancellor compared with just 17 per cent for Steinmeier.

Not surprisingly, the dismal state of Germany's Social Democrats is being compared to that of the British Labour Party before the arrival of Tony Blair.

"Is there anyone more miserable than Frank-Walter Steinmeier?" asked the German-language edition of the Financial Times recently. Much of the blame for the party's failure is being attributed to Steinmeier alone. Few would question his abilities as Foreign Minister, but as a candidate, he lacks charisma.

The weapon with which he hopes to defeat Merkel is a recently unveiled plan to create four million new jobs in Germany by the end of the next decade by investing in green-energy projects and retraining the unemployed to look after the country's increasingly elderly population.

Nobody doubts that the plan is a good one. But he has been unable to convince voters that his idea is realistic. The polls suggest only 13 per cent of voters believe him.

Steinmeier is a protege of Germany's controversial former Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. He spent years as a sort of top-level backroom boy, who always played second-fiddle to his boss. Schroeder rewarded him by making him his personal minister in the Chancellor's office.

When Merkel's conservatives were forced to form a grand coalition with the Social Democrats after the election in 2005, Steinmeier's abilities as a behind-the-scenes fixer made him a natural choice for Foreign Minister. But nowadays, he looks increasingly like the fall guy for a party in irreversible decline.

The Social Democrats have not recovered from the trauma of the Schroeder era. During his tenure as Chancellor, thousands of loyal members quit the party in disgust over his unpopular Agenda 2010 programme of cuts, which were seen as a travesty of party principles. The party is now divided with its left wing in favour of forming an alliance with the former Communist Left Party and the centre, represented by Steinmeier, strongly opposed to the idea. In the meantime, the party is struggling to present coherent policies.

GERMANY AT THE POLLS

* Elections to Germany's federal Parliament (Bundestag), held every four years, are on September 27, crowning what Germans call a "superwahljahr" (super election year) with more than a dozen local, state and federal polls.

* More than 60 million people will be eligible to vote.

* Half of the seats in Parliament are directly elected, the rest via party lists using proportional representation. The party or coalition of parties with most seats elects the Chancellor.

* For the first time this year, the OSCE will send a team of election monitors, after a row over the exclusion of smaller parties.

* Political parties must obtain at least 5 per cent of the vote under a post-war law designed to prevent extremists from coming to power.

* Turnout in German elections is typically high. In the 2005 Bundestag elections, 77.7 per cent of the electorate exercised their right to vote.

- INDEPENDENT