Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition suffered a new blow on Sunday over a report that Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was aware of controversial visa irregularities three years before he put a stop to them. Amid a steep drop in opinion polls due to the scandal before a key regional election in May, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung said Fischer knew in 2000 that Ukrainian criminals were possibly among those getting visas for Germany.
But it said Fischer, Schroeder's most important minister whose ouster would almost certainly cripple the government, did not respond to repeated police warnings to tighten the screening until 2003 after a million Ukrainians got visas.
The scandal, for which Fischer has taken the blame and acknowledged at one point he considered resigning, is a complex issue that also has caused friction in the coalition between Fischer's Greens party and Schroeder's Social Democrats.
Fischer's spokesman said on Saturday that the foreign minister had yet to say when he knew about the possibility of visa irregularities - and his visit to the German embassy in Kiev in 2000 focused on other issues.
The scandal has hurt the government in polls and threatens a similar SPD-Greens government in North Rhine-Westphalia. Before a May 22 election, polls show the SPD-Greens alliance in Germany's largest state trailing the opposition conservatives.
The scandal and fears in the public about "criminal gangs" from Ukraine roaming Germany also come at an awkward time as Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yushchenko, visits Berlin this week and will speak to the German parliament on Wednesday.
Wolfgang Schaeuble, a parliamentary leader for the Christian Democrats, led calls from the opposition for Fischer to resign over the latest revelations that cap a month of bleak headlines.
"He knew about it early enough but he didn't do anything," Schaeuble told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "In view of his unspeakably poor defence (and the scandal itself), there is enough justification for Fischer to resign twice over."
Christian Democrats (CDU) campaign manager Volker Kauder, who has worked hard to keep the scandal at the top of the news, said it was time for Fischer to admit what he knew about the lax visa practice and when.
"Fischer must explain why he waited so long to act," he said.
Juergen Ruettgers, CDU leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, said in a speech on Saturday that Fischer's intentionally lax visa policies facilitated human trafficking and he must resign.
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