Regardless of which political party gains ground in an important German state election this weekend, Germany itself is already emerging as a loser from the populist politics surrounding the poll. The ruling coalition of Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor, faces a crucial test in North Rhine-Westphalia this Sunday. Mr Schröder's Social Democrats have governed the key industrial state for 39 years and an electoral defeat there - which seems likely, according to polls - will be seen as a rejection of the government's reform agenda.

That is the least of it. For the second time in three years, Mr Schröder's party has cultivated for short-term electoral gains a crude and dangerous debate about the country's fundamental orientation. The first time Mr Schröder did this was in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, when he reached for the anti-American card. It helped him win national elections. But it was startling to see how quickly political tactics turned to passion and spiralled out of control. One of Mr Schröder's cabinet ministers compared the US president to Adolf Hitler. A leading Social Democratic parliamentarian said the US ambassador in Berlin was no different from a Soviet ambassador. Still another official insisted that the US was trying to impose its own "Brezhnev doctrine" on Europe. Worst of all, such demagoguery found resonance with the German public. A writer for Der Spiegel told me to ignore the anti-American covers the magazine was running at the time - editors were just trying to connect with their 1m readers, he explained. In truth, after that election, the German public would have needed a concerted education campaign about why the transatlantic relationship should matter at all. Alas, such a campaign never took place and the twin viruses of anti-Americanism and national-pacifism that Mr Schröder helped stir still fester in the German body politic.