As Japan struggles to prevent a catastrophe at its quake-damaged Fukushima plant, Merkel last week announced a three-month suspension, pending safety checks, of plans to prolong nuclear plants' lifetimes by more than a decade.

The 2010 extension, the biggest and most controversial decision of her now 17-month-old second term, had been taken despite strong public unease. But instead of the new "moratorium" being welcomed, it has backfired.

Critics have called it a knee-jerk reaction and one survey showed nearly seven out of 10 voters thought the announcement was "pure electioneering."

Off-the-cuff comments supposedly made by the economy minister and quoted by Thursday's Sueddeutsche Zeitung appeared to confirm such suspicions.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported Thursday that the nuclear decision, as well as Germany's abstention in last week's UN Security Council resolution on Libya, were creating "irritation" within government ranks.

Baden-Wuerttemberg is the most important of seven electoral tests in 2011, with the CDU having been in power for longer than Merkel, 56, has been alive.

The southwestern state has an economy the same size as Belgium's, forming a strong pillar of Europe's powerhouse at the start of what business daily Handelsblatt calls "a golden decade" for German exporters.

"If the CDU loses power in the state, there would be "another dark cloud in the chancellor's increasingly gloomy sky," political scientist Werner Patzelt told the Handelsblatt business daily.

Daimler, Porsche and auto parts giant Bosch are proud to call the 10.8-million-strong state home, as do a whole army of lesser-known champions like Recaro (car and aircraft seats), Wuerth (screws) and Voith (engineering).

Another is family-owned Kaercher, conquering the world -- and making it cleaner -- with high-pressure blasters from its base in the well-ordered town of Winnenden outside state capital Stuttgart.

"We have a tradition of good engineering in this state," chief executive Hartmut Jenner proudly told AFP at the firm's headquarters.

"People are dedicated to hard work and hard work is a part of their life. We have never laid off anyone for business reasons."

"I've never known anything other than the CDU here," said Gregor Baumstark, 32, a local taxi driver. "Economically we are doing great. Everything works, firms are making profits, hiring."

But losing power in the state, the latest setback in Merkel's second term after a hammering by the Social Democrats (SPD) in Hamburg in February and ceding North Rhine-Westphalia in May, is what polls suggest might happen.

Surveys had already suggested a tight race because of a row over a mammoth rail project that last year sparked the ugliest and angriest clashes in living memory in normally tranquil Stuttgart.

But events in Japan meant this and other burning local issues like education have been overtaken, with 68 percent of people in a recent poll saying the nuclear question would have an "important influence" on their vote.

The main winners are set to be the ecologist Greens, potentially giving them a state premier for the first time.

The latest poll on Thursday put them and the SPD five points ahead of the CDU and the Free Democrats (FDP), Merkel's coalition partners nationally.

Last Sunday the Greens doubled their share of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and another election this Sunday in Rhineland-Palatinate state in the west could see them becoming part of the governing coalition with the SPD.

"This year is definitely going to see a peak in the development of the Greens in Germany," Nils Diederich, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin, told AFP.

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