Anti-nuclear rally enlivens German campaign

A convey of 350 farm tractors rumbled through Berlin on Saturday to launch a mass anti-nuclear rally, designed to influence Germany's general election in three weeks' time. About 50,000 opponents of nuclear power took part in the protest, which kicked off with an 8-km (5-mile)-long convey of tractors that passed in front of Chancellor Angela Merkel's offices and through the government quarter to the city's historic Brandenburg Gate. Determined to make nuclear power a focus of the election campaign, the protesters criticised Merkel and her conservative party, which wants to scrap a 2001 law to shut down Germany's 17 remaining nuclear power plants by the mid-2020s. "We won't tolerate any backtracking on the nuclear exit," Fritz Pothmer, a northern German farmer, said to cheers at the largest anti-nuclear rally in years. "It's nuclear insanity. How could Merkel become such a tool of the nuclear lobby?" The future of nuclear power is one of the few key issues that divide Merkel's Christian Democrats from the Social Democrats (SPD) of her challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The parties have shared power for the past four years in an awkward 'grand coalition' that both want to end.