BERLIN: Until last week, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder looked lost at sea, his hopes of winning another term in elections next month all but washed up.

But since floods devastated vast swathes of the country, other watery metaphors have become more fitting. Schroeder’s firm handling of the crisis may turn the tide for his Social Democrats, buoying his slim chances of a second term.

Fears that global warming prompted by man-made pollution might have been partly to blame for the floods, along with heightened concern about general environmental issues, have also helped the SPD’s junior coalition partners, the Greens.

A poll conducted by the Forsa institute late last week as flood waters ravaged eastern Germany and published in the Stern magazine on Monday put the SPD up a point from the week before to 36 per cent and the Greens up one to seven per cent.

The survey showed the conservatives of Schroeder’s challenger Edmund Stoiber slipping a point to 40 per cent and their traditional coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats, down two points at eight per cent.

Analysts said Schroeder still had a mountain to climb if he was not to become the first post-war chancellor to only serve one term, but they said the floods had at the very least distracted from a recent raft of negative headlines and poor economic data.

“If the floods have any effect, then it will be a small one,” said Oskar Niedermayer, politics professor at Berlin’s Free University. “Red-Green will probably be removed, but it is not yet certain because many voters are still undecided,” he said, referring to the SPD’s ruling coalition with the Greens.

FLOATING VOTERS: It is the floating voters, many of whom live in the flood-stricken former Communist east, that Schroeder has repeatedly said he wants to win over to the SPD by exploiting his own popularity in the last spurt of the election campaign.