Hence the second reason why next year's budget is so important for Mr Brown's chancellorship.
The CDU has also admitted operating a system of secret accounts during Mr Kohl's chancellorship.
It had been reported that Mr Balls blamed Lord Mandelson for blocking his move to the chancellorship.
That is, of course, if the chancellorship is not available to him which it probably will not be.
None of this rules out a bid by Mr Haider for the chancellorship at the next general election, due by 2004.
After re-establishing himself as the opposition's main leader, he probably hopes to have another serious shot at the chancellorship in, say, 2006.
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And if Ms Merkel is successful and sticks around, she may prevent some state premiers from ever having a shot at the chancellorship.
In 1982 he seized the chancellorship with a daring parliamentary manoeuvre.
Angela Merkel, 52, won last fall's elections for the chancellorship of Europe's largest economy, surprising the incumbent, Gerhard Schroder, and even members of her own Christian Democratic Union.
But with a rousing speech in Dresden Mrs Merkel seems to have regained her authority and won back her credentials as the main opposition candidate for the chancellorship.
Oskar Lafontaine, the man he beat to become his party's candidate for the chancellorship, remains powerful as party chairman, and also has an option on the finance ministry.
It has run through four party chairmen in the past five years and its candidate for the chancellorship, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now foreign minister, looks no match for the popular incumbent, the CDU's Angela Merkel.
Too much space, inevitably, is devoted to a self-exonerating, and presumably cathartic account of the tribulations of the Social Democrats in general and himself in particular, starting with his unsuccessful bid for the chancellorship in 1990.
Mr Biedenkopf is the only leading Christian Democrat so far to have publicly opposed Mr Kohl's decision to stand for the chancellorship yet again next year, but there are others, more timid, who share his views.
He won the party's nomination for the chancellorship only a few months before last year's general election, much too late to be able to impose his will single-mindedly, either in the selection of policies or of top people.
With a CV that includes top roles with the Conservative Party, the chancellorship of Oxford University, the governorship of Hong Kong and the House of Lords, Lord Patten is no stranger to the higher echelons of the British establishment.
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