NEWS ANALYSIS : Despite the Odds, Germany’s Kohl Is Once Again a Front-Runner : Election: Long-ruling chancellor gets a boost as Social Democrats’ moderate leader slips in early polling.

A series of electoral setbacks has thrown Rudolf Scharping, the Social Democratic Party leader once widely seen as Germany’s next chancellor, into second place in this election-rich year and increased odds that Chancellor Helmut Kohl can hold power when Germany conducts federal elections in October.

Such a resurgence would make Kohl, who as leader of the Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag has governed Germany since 1982, one of the longest-tenured heads of government in the democratic world--though by no means one of the most popular.

In election after election this spring--at the state, municipal and European levels--voters in unforeseen numbers have rejected Social Democrats and their blandly moderate leader in favor of Kohl’s Christian Democrats, the Greens or, increasingly, even the former Communist Party of what used to be East Germany.

A public opinion survey unveiled Monday showed the extent of Scharping’s troubles: 40% of those polled said they would vote for Kohl’s Christian Democrats if federal elections were held next week; only 36% said they would elect Social Democrats. It was the widest such margin for Christian Democrats in three years. Just one month ago, the Social Democrats narrowly led.

The most recent blow for the Social Democrats came Sunday, when voters in the depressed eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls. So many moderate-to-leftists whom Scharping, 46, might have expected to vote Social Democrat voted instead for the former East German Communist Party that Kohl’s unpopular Christian Democrats managed a narrow victory.

More surprising still, in municipal elections held Sunday in the former East German state of Saxony, voters in the city of Hoyerswerda elected a member of the former East German Communist Party--now doing business as the Party of Democratic Socialism--as mayor.

Although a number of tiny towns and villages in the former East Germany had elected former-Communist mayors since the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989, Hoyerswerda, population 100,000, is by far the largest city to do so.

Analysts insist that the flash of enthusiasm for former Communists doesn’t reveal lingering support for hard-line ideas as much as it shows the failings of the two main German political parties: Neither the Christian Democrats nor the Social Democrats have convinced eastern Germans that they are much more than colonizers from the rich outside, seeking to impose their will on a disadvantaged, vulnerable East.

In a startling response to Sunday’s elections, Reinhard Hoeppner, the Social Democrat gubernatorial contender in Saxony-Anhalt, said that his party might be able to work in an informal coalition with the former Communists if it were in a position to form a minority government in the state. Such a plan would have been unthinkable just weeks ago; ever since the East German government’s collapse, western Germany’s political parties have ridiculed the former Communists and vowed to have nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile, Christian Democrats in the state, seeking to build a governing coalition, said they would even be willing--though by no means eager--to govern in coalition with Social Democrats.

But such an alliance of the two main German parties--a “grand coalition”--would be poorly received by voters and would send a discouraging signal to the many Germans who believe this country needs fresh faces and new ideas.

Recent events mark a dramatic change from the mood in Germany as recently as March, when voters were heading for polls in the first of 29 elections that will occur by year’s end.

Kohl then simply appeared to be running out of gas. Unemployment in Germany was 4 million or more, depending on how it was measured; public disappointment with the reunification was rampant, and the public had grown deeply skeptical about entrenched politicians. Factions in the coalition with the Christian Democrats were grumbling and plotting; even in the governing party there was talk of replacing Kohl.

Against that backdrop, Scharping’s strategy has been to portray himself as a responsible centrist for whom a middle-of-the-road German--even a disenchanted Christian Democrat--could vote with confidence.

Scharping distanced himself from his party’s leftist wing, saying he was proud to have had as many as 150,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in his state, Rhineland-Palatinate.

He embraced the concept of privatizing public services, complained about the welfare state’s growth, warned labor unions they compromised Germany’s position in the world economy and favored noncombat participation by Germany in U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Germans seemed drawn to this moderate voice of change: Polls showed almost half of the electorate thought Scharping’s Social Democrats would form the next government, at least in coalition, while less than a fifth thought Kohl’s Christian Democrats would return to power in Bonn.

Last week, in an effort to regain percentages, Scharping used a party convention in the eastern city of Halle to deliver an uncharacteristically passionate speech. “We have to fight more directly and determinedly so that there will be a change on Oct. 16,” he said to applause from party delegates who had complained about his leadership. “You can’t look forward if you’re hanging your head.”

Andreas Scharpf and Christopher Steinmetz of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report from Halle.