A folksy guy who once informed for the East German secret police, Rolf Kutzmutz is the odds-on bet to become the first reconstructed Communist to win a big-city mayor's job in unified Germany.
A genial 46-year-old with no apologies for his past, Kutzmutz is favored in Sunday's runoff - as are a slew of fellow remade Communists in Brandenburg state running under the banner of the Party of Democratic Socialism.That has provoked a backlash among western German politicians and business leaders, who have called for a ban on his party or an investment boycott in areas where it wins city halls.
"We are not nostalgic. We are not looking back," Kutzmutz, who joined the Communist party in 1967, told a rally of 1,500 adoring and mostly gray-haired Potsdamers this week.
"And this talk of a hope that I would establish a little socialist island, a little Cuba. That is all nonsense," he added, promising to thunderous applause "to give government back to the people."
Three days before the Dec. 5 election that Kutzmutz dominated in this state capital southwest of Berlin, opponents disclosed that he was an informer for East Germany's Stasi secret police in the early 1970s.
The man who had smiled from campaign posters that read "My biography doesn't just begin in 1989" - the year the Berlin Wall fell - immediately acknowledged that he had informed.
But so had tens of thousands of others. The more involved an East German was in public life, the more apt he or she was to be pressured into informing. Kutzmutz casually left copies of his Stasi files around City Hall.
Kutzmutz was an economist with the city waterworks when he informed. A decade later, he became Communist party economics secretary in Potsdam. Now he's city chairman of the former Communists, known by their new initials PDS.
PDS leaders contend, with some justification, that theirs is the only party that speaks the same language as most eastern Germans.
Easterners complain that west German politicians and business leaders have arrogantly ignored them since unification, laying off workers by the hundreds of thousands.
The PDS plays to this discontent, insisting it is a socialist, democratic party divorced from its predecessor. The carpetbagging Western managers who go east are the ones acting like dictators, party leaders say.