Bonn Coalition Wins Election; Majority Drops

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s governing center-right coalition was returned to power in West Germany’s federal elections Sunday but with a reduced majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament.

According to official provisional figures, the big winners were the Free Democratic Party, a junior partner in the Kohl coalition, and the environmentalist Greens party, which scored a significant gain from its showing in the 1983 election when it entered Parliament for the first time.

“People said the Greens would be . . . just an episode, a passing phase but (our support) has stabilized and we are here to stay,” Greens parliamentary deputy Otto Schily declared at a raucous victory party in a Bonn discotheque.

The Free Democrats got 9.1% of the vote, up from 7.0% in the 1983 vote. The Greens got 8.3% of the vote, well above the party’s 5.6% tally four years ago.

The results averted a potential political shift to the right by apparently blocking efforts by conservative Bavarian leader Franz Josef Strauss to secure a key Cabinet post. Strauss, premier of Bavaria, is head of the Christian Social Union, sister party of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union, and the third partner in the Bonn coalition.

The results meant the government’s overall majority in Parliament was cut from 58 seats to 40.

Kohl expressed disappointment at the lower majority, which he attributed to complacency on the part of his party and voters, but he promised no change in government policies. The low voter turnout, due in part to bad weather and the absence of controversial issues, was 84.4%, a drop from the 1983 turnout of 89.1%, and the lowest since the first election in West Germany in 1949.

“We have achieved our goal of continuing the coalition,” Kohl said. “But we have not achieved our election target. I had expected around 46%. That is distressing and a sensitive loss, we can’t talk our way out of that.”

According to the vote tally, the combined vote for Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union was 44.3% of the total.

This compared to 48.8% of the electorate in 1983, and it was the lowest figure polled by the Christian Democrats since the 1949 election when the party and the Christian Social Union received a total of 31.0% of the vote.

The Free Democrats’ showing gave the Bonn coalition a majority of 53.4%.

Social Democrats’ Loss

The opposition Social Democrats, with Johannes Rau, premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as candidate for chancellor, polled 37.0%, down from the 38.2% it won in 1983. This was the lowest percentage polled by the party in a national election in 25 years.

The official voting results would give each party the following representation in the new 497-member Parliament: Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, 223 seats, down from 244; the Social Democrats, 186 seats, down from 193; the Free Democrats, 46 seats, up from 34, and the Greens 42 seats, up from 27.

Political commentators suggested that the stronger showing of the Free Democrats indicated a wish for moderation on the part of West German voters. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a former head of the Free Democratic Party, has called for cordial relations with the Soviet Union and East Germany.

Genscher said he views the election result as an endorsement of his liberal foreign policy initiatives. Strauss, long reputed to have coveted Genscher’s Cabinet post, has advocated a tougher line in Bonn’s foreign policy.

The election result seemed to put an end to Strauss’ ambitions to depose Genscher as foreign minister, a job that would have been difficult to deny him had the Christian Democrats won an absolute majority without the Free Democrats.

Harsher Security Measures

Strauss also urged harsher internal security measures, which seem not to have appealed to all the voters in the conservative parties.

Under West Germany’s complicated proportional representation election system, voters cast two ballots, one for a specific candidate and the other for a party. Many Christian Democrats are thought to have given their second ballots to the Free Democrats.

In conceding defeat, candidate Rau noted that he and the left-center Social Democrats had avoided the large losses predicted by some public opinion polls and political commentators, but he admitted: “The result is not what we hoped and worked for. We are the losers.”

The party had been plagued by a scandal in a housing association owned by the national trade unions and by internal squabbling over policy on nuclear power plants.

Leaders of the Greens said their stronger showing at the polls means that they will step up their campaign against nuclear power stations and a big nuclear waste disposal plant in Bavaria. The party is also opposed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Women’s Support for Greens

Petra Kelly, a Greens leader, said that the party’s success was due to the strong support among West German women. And another Greens leader, Lukas Beckmann, said that the election result indicates that eventually the Social Democrats would have to form an alliance with the Greens.

The Christian Democrats claimed credit for creating a stable government in their appeal for four more years in office, and the Social Democrats railed at the high unemployment rate of 8.9%.

But there were no dramatic issues that surfaced during the campaign, and most observers said that the outcome was probably decided by the fact that the economy was healthy and most West Germans were better off than ever before. The campaign’s final week, however, was overshadowed by the kidnaping of at least two West Germans in Lebanon.

The only violent incident reported during polling day came in the town of Moerfelden-Waldorf near Frankfurt, where hooded figures tossed a Molotov cocktail into the ballot box in a kindergarten. No one was hurt but the ballots were destroyed and residents will have to vote again.