"It was the Sun wot won it" was the headline that greeted readers of the Sun newspaper, a UK tabloid, the day after the 1992 UK elections. The paper claimed its campaign against the euro had helped the beleaguered UK Conservative government to another term in office.

The euro or teuero, as incensed Germans call it, punning on the German word for "expensive", is just one of the problems Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his incumbent Social Democratic Party (SPD) face in the run-up to the country's general election.The conviction that prices have been rounded up in the conversion from the Deutschmark to the European currency is unshakeable.