AFP

BERLIN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel’s party faced a drubbing in Germany’s most populous state on Sunday as voters cast ballots in a snap election that could provide impetus to her main rivals in the countdown to 2013 national polls.

A week after voters in Greece and France clearly plumped for anti-austerity policies, the citizens of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) could also punish conservative champions of belt-tightening.

Some 13.2 million voters — more than a fifth of Germany’s electorate — were choosing a new regional parliament in the bellwether western state which hosts a major industrial base.

Voter turnout in NRW was about 29 percent at midday, officials said.

The region historically plays a big role in federal politics — in 2005, a lost vote in NRW prompted then chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to call a snap federal election which saw Merkel wrest power from him.

Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is fighting to capture the powerhouse state from a coalition made up of the centre- left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and ecologist Greens.

Despite surveys consistently revealing strong national support among German voters for Merkel’s austerity drive in Europe and for her party, the CDU is trailing the SPD by six or seven points in opinion polls taken in the NRW vote.

It is the third regional vote in eight weeks and comes a week after Merkel’s centreright coalition lost power in the state of Schleswig- Holstein.

The polls suggest that the SPD’s popular lead candidate in NRW, state premier Hannelore Kraft, could again be headed into a coalition with the Greens and, unlike last time, enjoy a majority.

“If it turns out well for us, for Red-Green, it would be an important sign for the federal elections,” Kraft told the German DPA news agency on casting her ballot.

The poll was triggered after her minority state government unexpectedly fell when the regional parliament failed to pass a draft budget after just 22 months in power.