Preliminary results

SPD: 36.5% (+0.3%) CDU: 26.2% (-4.5%) Schill: 19.4% (+19.4%) Greens: 8.5% (-5.4%) FDP: 5.1% (+1.6%) Others: 4.3% (-11.4%)

The man known as Judge Merciless, Ronald Barnabas Schill, has come from nowhere to take 19.4% of the vote.

Mr Schill, notorious for his championing of the death penalty and castration for sex offenders, may now be poised to become interior minister in Germany's second city.

"The people of Hamburg want to be properly governed," he said as the first results came in. "At last we want to follow up our words with deeds."

For some in a city which - as Mr Schill never misses an opportunity to mention - has a crime rate 10 times that of Munich, this is a welcome prospect.

For others, it is a chilling warning of a new breed of right-wing politicians unafraid to champion policies which have long been taboo in Germany.

Black sheriff

The judge won his nickname from a local newspaper five years ago when he sent a mentally ill woman to prison for two-and-a-half years for scratching cars.

An Indian got the same penalty when he was found with a forged EU passport.

Mr Schill soon won another title - the Black Sheriff.

But when in 1997 he advocated the death penalty for "bestial" murders and contract killings he went a step too far for Hamburg's then Interior Minister, Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem.

Mr Hoffmann-Riem said he was "speechless" to hear the death penalty discussed by a judge "whose office is only a stone's throw away from the place where the guillotine carried out its daily deadly work during the Nazi era".

Hijackers hideout

Mr Schill was removed from his post - but this was just the launch pad for his political career.

New-found friend? CDU's Ole von Beust with Mr Schill

He founded the Law and Order party in July 2000 and just over a year later had almost a fifth of the people of Hamburg behind him.

In a city with low unemployment and few other social problems, fear of crime - particularly in relation to the large immigrant population - is fertile territory for Mr Schill's rhetoric.

The revelation that three of the suspected hijackers who attacked New York and Washington had been living undetected in Hamburg only fuelled his argument - the city had, he said, provided the "best conditions for their work".

He has pledged an extra 2,000 police officers for the city.

Judges, he says, should impose penalties in the upper third of what is permissible and pleas for clemency should go unheeded.

CDU quandary

He blames the generation of 1968 liberals for the current state of affairs and has won a following among the middle-aged, lower middle-class, apparently taking their support from the Christian Democrats (CDU).

This poses something of a quandary for the CDU.

It has flirted with Schill-like policies before - notably in the "Kinder statt Inder" (Children not Indians) anti-immigration campaign in North Rhein Westphalia last year.

But while Mr Schill has shown that even one of Germany's traditionally most liberal cities laps up harsh right-wing rhetoric, not all Christian Democrats are yet ready to follow the lead of the black sheriff.