Germany's highest court will announce on Thursday whether next month's parliamentary election can go ahead, ruling on a claim that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's path to an early vote is unconstitutional, reported Reuters.

Any decision to stop the vote would come as a major shock to politicians and financial markets, with parties now well into campaigns for an early election all of them support.

Markets hope a clear outcome from the election will provide a strong government capable of pushing through reforms of Europe's largest economy.

The court will announce at 08:00 GMT its decision on whether to allow the election, in which Angela Merkel's opposition conservatives look set to beat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD).

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are 12-14 points ahead in the latest polls.

Markets for the most part reckon with victory for the CDU, which promotes more business-friendly reforms than their opponents. Public unease over unemployment, now over 11 percent, and low economic growth have eroded SPD support.

The Neue Ruhr Zeitung paper said on Tuesday judges of the Federal Constitutional Court had decided by a majority of 7 to 1 to let the election go ahead, a year ahead of schedule.

A court spokeswoman later dismissed the report as "pure speculation." The court could block the planned election if at least five of the eight judges support the legal challenges.

Shadow of Weimar

Schroeder asked for the vote to be brought forward 12 months after a crushing defeat in a key regional election in May. He paved the way for it by calling, and deliberately losing, a vote of confidence in the federal parliament on July 1.

The court is to rule on a case brought by two rebel deputies in Schroeder's coalition, who argue President Horst Koehler was wrong to dissolve parliament after the engineered vote.

They say it was at odds with the constitution, which deliberately makes it hard to dissolve parliament before the end of its four-year term. The reasons for this date back to the Weimar Republic, the chronically unstable inter-war political system which collapsed with the rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazis.

In an earlier ruling on Tuesday, the court dismissed an attempt by two small parties -- the Ecological-Democratic Party and the Family Party of Germany -- to stop the early election.

They were among a number of minor parties which had challenged the poll on the grounds that bringing it forward by a year gave them too little time to prepare -- a different argument from the one at issue on Thursday.

If the judges reject the plan for early elections, Schroeder may hang on in office until the end of his four-year term, though he would be weakened politically and could face pressure to step aside.

In 1983, the last time the court was called on to make a similar ruling, it upheld the then-president's decision to allow an early election even though the chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had a comfortable majority.

(Chinadaily.com via agencies August 25, 2005)