BONN -- Germany's opposition Social Democrats, or SPD, met Monday to come to terms with a disastrous election result in their one-time stronghold of Berlin, after months of wrangling and failure to shape new policies.


The SPD crashed to just 23.6 percent in Sunday's state election in the city where former chancellor Willy Brandt used to score more than 60 percent as mayor in the 1960s.


It was the center-left party's fifth worst showing in 174 state and national elections since 1945. Commentators and party officials left no doubt where they thought the blame lay.


"Big mistakes were made here in Bonn over the summer," new party manager Franz M--ntefering told West German Radio as the party executives, including chairman Rudolf Scharping and rivals Gerhard Schr?der and Oskar Lafontaine, met in Bonn.


"We must make it clear that the personal wrangling in Bonn has to stop. I hope everyone has now understood where it leads."


Commentators were damning of the once mighty party which has seen its nationwide ratings slide to post-war lows.


They wondered how much longer the lackluster Scharping, already the subject of countless party coup rumors after a summer of fighting off Schr?der, could hang on.


Exit surveys taken in Berlin showed Scharping's personal rating had plunged to almost unprecedented depths for any party leader.


"The air for Scharping has got so thin, not only in Berlin, that it's hardly enough to breathe," said the daily Saarbr--cker Zeitung.


But the air is also getting thin for the whole party, which like its European sister movements is desperately seeking a new message as its traditional working-class base disappears. It has cast envious glances at the revamp which Tony Blair has given Britain's Labour Party. German voters seem less and less sure what the SPD stands for.


In Berlin the big gains went to parties with sharp profiles -- the East German reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, which took 14.6 percent, and the leftist-ecologist Greens, with 13.2 percent.


"The problem of the SPD is that it is stuck in the middle and is in danger of being ground away -- in the West between the Christian Democrats [or CDU] and the Greens, and in the East between the CDU and the PDS," SPD member of parliament Thomas Kr--ger said.


The SPD was unable to maintain any profile in Berlin as the junior partner in a coalition with Chancellor Helmut Kohl's CDU, which slipped three points to 37.4 percent in the poll. But the SPD has also been unable to grab attention in opposition in Bonn. "People don't think the SPD has economic competence any more," ZDF national television commented. "In Berlin, people don't even think it would do a better job at fighting unemployment than the CDU.


"That's an alarm signal for all Social Democrats. It shows the causes of the defeat go deep and that questions of personalities alone are not nearly enough to explain the debacle."