NEWS ANALYSIS : Kohl’s Border Bumbling Raises a Leadership Question : Germany: The ham-handed approach worries Western neighbors. Why was his initial stand necessary?

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s bumbling and stumbling on the Polish border question has baffled friends and foes alike, here and abroad, and called into question his ability to lead a united Germany.

Political analysts searched for answers Wednesday to explain Kohl’s initial position, then reversal, on the Polish issue, which most believed was unnecessary to begin with. They said it had damaged the chancellor’s already hesitant claims of statesmanship.

Kohl will attempt to stake out claims to such leadership when he visits the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today to reassure other alliance members that a reunified Germany will not become neutralist.

But what worries many Western neighbors is the ham-handed way that Kohl attempted to handle the sensitive issue of whether a reunified Germany might seek to recover territory lost in World War II. The issue is of deep concern not only to Poland but also to the Soviet Union--and to Eastern and Western Europeans--as German unity becomes imminent.

“Kohl has seriously damaged himself at home and his country abroad,” said one Western diplomat. “It makes you wonder about his judgment.”

Kohl’s diplomatic finesse was also called into question when he insisted that then-President Ronald Reagan accompany him to a war cemetery where SS soldiers are buried and when he compared Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Most analysts believe that Kohl equivocated over recognizing the present western border of Poland to curry favor with the “expellees”--ethnic Germans and their descendants who were forced to leave the territories ceded to Poland after the war.

The conventional wisdom holds that these voters are mainly right-wing conservatives who would be tempted to opt for the far-right Republicans party if Kohl’s Christian Democrats prove soft on the Polish border question. Kohl worries that the Republicans will take seats away from him, perhaps even depriving him of his governing majority, in national elections scheduled for December.

But that political calculus may be wrong.

On Wednesday, Hartmut Koschyk, the general secretary of the League of Expellees in Bonn, indicated that he harbored no hard feelings toward Kohl for capitulating Tuesday by agreeing to guarantee Poland’s present borders.

And although Koschyk claims that there are some 12 million expellees in West Germany, most are descendants of those who fled, and it is not at all clear whether they share the desire to regain lost territories to the point of voting Republican.

Thus, apparently to curry the uncertain vote of the expellee bloc, Kohl has angered his coalition partners, the Free Democrats led by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and given the opposition Social Democrats a campaign issue. His ineptness has also alarmed his allies and East Bloc neighbors.

The Social Democrats are also charging Kohl with high-handedness in dealing with the touchy issue of reunification, which affects all Europe, and projecting an international image of something akin to a thick-skinned rogue elephant.

“He treats the (reunification) matter as more or less his private business,” Social Democratic leader Hans-Jochen Vogel complained.

And Oskar Lafontaine, expected to be the Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor in the elections, added: “The chancellor lacks a sure touch in matters of foreign policy. He seems to regard policy on Germany the way a child holds on to a toy that he doesn’t want anyone to take away from him--not even his own coalition, not even the foreign minister.”

In pursuing reunification, Kohl is attempting to bring it about in the quickest possible way: by urging that the East German Volkskammer, or Parliament, should agree soon after the March 18 election that East Germany should be annexed by the federal republic.

Other political leaders suggest a slower timetable, perhaps with East and West Germany negotiating a joint constitution.

Kohl’s insistence on haste, in the view of some political observers, is designed to keep his Christian Democrats in the political driver’s seat. According to this argument, Kohl is seeking to take credit for unification and hoping to translate this into votes in December. Kohl seeks to undercut the rise of a strong Social Democratic government in East Germany that could strengthen the mother party in West Germany for the election, which is now seen as a close race.

“He wishes to be seen as the politician who unified Germany,” observed a political analyst here. “He thinks this is the best issue in a tight race and he dearly wants to be chancellor of all the Germans after December, and not just an opposition politician.”