BERLIN: Confirming that Germany's agenda for economic changes is on the back burner, leading conservative politicians are adopting increasingly populist policies, calling for higher payments to retirees and an increase in the inheritance tax and other taxes as they seek to outdo their leftist coalition partners to strengthen their position before federal elections next year.

The call for higher spending was made by Jürgen Rüttgers, the conservative premier of North-Rhine Westphalia, who won elections in the most populous state in 2005 after breaking the stranglehold held by the Social Democrats for more than three decades.

Rüttgers, who is deputy leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, which favors a strong state with considerable intervention in the economy, said during the weekend that Germany's 20 million retirees deserved better treatment. He said that the obligatory basic state pensions had to be increased, even though the cabinet had already agreed this month to raise pensions by 1.1 percent. That decision will cost the taxpayer more than €12 billion, or $19 billion, from this summer to the end of 2012, according to the Finance Ministry.

"The basic pensioner, who has paid into the pension funds for a long time, should be getting a higher pension than the basic one," Rüttgers said. "The question is that some people do wonder why should they work at all if not having worked produced the same pension."