For Socialists in Germany, Empty Streets : Election: A series of disasters have set the party up for a likely drubbing in unified national voting.

With flags flying and loudspeaker blaring, the bright little car trundled optimistically into this eastern German farming community--a one-vehicle caravan dispatched to spread the socialist message among those preparing to vote in Sunday’s national elections.

There was only one problem: the streets were empty.

Stopping only long enough for a few curious residents to peer out their windows and see the letters “SPD”--Social Democratic Party--on the flags, the car spewed forth a brief, indecipherable message followed by a few bars of heavy “oom-pah” music, then exited as it came.

Although only a fleeting moment in a long campaign, the incident in many ways captured the poorly organized, occasionally farcical effort that has characterized the Social Democrats’ attempt to wrest power away from Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s center-right coalition.

This disorganization is part of a wider set of problems plaguing the traditional party of Germany’s moderate left, turning what by rights should be its hour of triumph into an electoral struggle that carries all the earmarks of an impending disaster.

Former Social Democrat Chancellor Helmut Schmidt dismayed his party colleagues as much by the truth as by the lack of tact in his recent comment to a Dutch newspaper that not only would the party lose the first free all-German elections in nearly 60 years next Sunday, but it deserved to lose.

Despite the upbeat rhetoric of the party’s ill-chosen chancellor candidate, Oskar Lafontaine, leading political opinion polls show that with the election only days away, the Social Democrats trail Kohl’s Christian Democrats by 10 to 12 percentage points and the combined total of Kohl’s coalition parties by as much as 22.4 percentage points.

“No one with such a large lead has ever before been overhauled,” said Reichard Schneider, an election pollster at the INFAS opinion survey organization in Bonn.

Instead of contemplating victory, the SPD officials are considering the very real prospects of their worst drubbing since the party was revamped into a mass-based party in the late 1950s.

Just over a year ago, they exuded confidence. The party was level or ahead of Kohl’s Christian Democrats in the West German opinion polls, and its leaders spoke confidently of a built-in majority among the predominantly northern, Protestant--and traditionally socialist--regions of eastern Germany.

It was a majority that would likely ensure the party’s dominance for decades once unification occurred, they believed.

But instead of guaranteeing the Social Democrats power, the unification process brought a series of setbacks that, collectively, completely reversed party fortunes.

The problems first surfaced a month before the Berlin Wall collapsed in November, 1989, when a group of East Germans founded an eastern Social Democratic Party in defiance of the Communist authorities still in power there.

Unsure at that point if the East German Communist regime would survive, the party’s western leadership hesitated for weeks before extending its official recognition to the new group. This move poisoned relations between the party’s eastern and western wings after the subsequent Communist collapse, and it remains a sore point, inhibiting meaningful cooperation.

Such hesitation characterized later moves.

Reluctant to forsake years of carefully constructed political contacts with East Germany, the West German Social Democrats found themselves both incapable of adjusting to the speed of unification and hopelessly out of touch with the public mood in the east.

They argued for a slow, deliberate course toward unity when most East Germans wanted it immediately. They tried to put off national elections when East Germans wanted them soon. They stoked fears about the huge costs of unity when the nation wanted most to savor its reunion.

As Kohl sensed the moment and threw himself behind unification, Lafontaine seemed to resist events.

The results were disastrous.

Instead of winning the East German national elections last March as they assumed they would, the Social Democrats won only 21.8% of the vote and were crushed by the Christian Democrats.

In May, the SPD lost local government elections and in an October vote managed to gain power in only one of the five new federal states created from what had been East Germany.

The dismal showings have only deepened differences within the party.

Serious, sometimes open, clashes over policy and tactics have left Lafontaine isolated from the party’s mainstream and adopting almost a flip, uncaring attitude in the final days of the campaign.

An April assassination attempt against him also left Lafontaine noticeably more detached from the political debate.

While Lafontaine, despite the party’s difficulties, has drawn well in western cities nearer his Saarland home, Social Democrats’ efforts in eastern Germany have been hampered by the sense of futility that characterized the party’s recent foray into this small village.

On the Magdeburg city square, where 70,000 greeted former Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt last December, barely 1,000 turned out for Lafontaine in September.

“The collapse of Stalinism should have begun a decade of social democracy,” a senior party official in Bonn said recently. “Instead, there will be a search for scapegoats, for what went wrong and for a new identity.”