Post-Unity Apathy Grips German Voters

On the surface, it is a cozy tableau: The spicy fragrance of hot mulled wine warming a frosty evening as families thread their way through the annual Christmas market, stopping to buy hand-dipped candles or to treat their children to pony rides.

Wolfgang Meckelberg, an earnest high-school teacher campaigning for Parliament, patrols the crowd, trying to hand out pamphlets and miniature flags.

“Get lost!” someone mutters as the candidate passes by.

The sentiment is hardly unique to this gritty industrial valley as Germans prepare to vote Sunday as a united nation for the first time since Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.

In Gelsenkirchen, at least, the mood seems more “Bah, humbug” than “Ho, ho, ho.”

Even the politicians are having a hard time getting excited about what by all rights should be a significant election.

“I’m afraid people won’t even rouse themselves to go vote this time,” said Joachim Posz, the district’s incumbent Parliament member and a Social Democrat. The liberal party traditionally carries an enthusiastic majority here in the Ruhr Valley of western Germany.

“People are just drained emotionally,” Posz explained. “We’ve lived through so much in this past year, with the Berlin Wall opening and reunification.”

His Christian Democratic challenger agrees.

“Maybe outsiders see this as a time for jubilation across Germany again,” said Meckelberg, “but that’s not how the Germans themselves see it.”

Now, the prospect of choosing someone to lead united Germany into a new European era seems anti-climatic. The campaign, too, has been passionless, with no polarizing issues to separate the main parties, as East-West rivalries and disarmament did in the past. Opinion polls for months have forecast an overwhelming victory for Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his center-right Christian Democrats.

“An election battle without a fight,” summed up the liberal Munich daily newspaper Sueddeutsche.

“All other issues--ecology, unemployment, social services--were put on the back burner throughout this yearlong happening,” said Gelsenkirchen City Manager Klaus Bussfeld. “Unification, emotionally, was like having Christmas, New Year’s Eve and your birthday all come on the same day.”

Campaign managers made a few gimmicky attempts to recapture the drama.

For example, the Social Democrats consider one of the high points of their campaign here the day they made a replica of the Brandenburg Gate out of bedsheets.

The party urged passers-by to stroll through the wash ‘n’ wear gate on Unification Day in October to vicariously share the thrill of Berliners whose once-divided city is now reconnected at the famous gate.

This coal-and-steel town of about 300,000 people shares many of the problems that bedevil the five new states that once made up East Germany: unemployment, a severe housing shortage, environmental damage.

And as inhabitants here watch billions of marks pour into the east in an effort to bring it up to western German standards, cynicism, apathy and a growing bitterness appear to have replaced the euphoria and optimism of Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Wall opened.

“Why don’t they send some of that help our way, do something to finance us, too?” demanded Wilhelm Katt, who works for a large foundry.

“Did you hear about the railroad workers over there (in the east) going on strike for wages equal to ours?” he asked. “That’s a provocation. They only pay a fraction what we do in rent, and they don’t produce as much. Why should they earn the same?”

Siegfried Dulog, a trade unionist, also complained of high expectations by the former East Germans.

“In all fairness, everybody pays for unification, easterners as well as westerners,” Dulog said. “But the problem is that we spent the past 50 years building our country up and now they want everything overnight. They expect too much too soon.

“The mood here is no good.”

Monika Kandelbinder, 26, is similarly disgruntled and sees little point in going to the voting booth on Sunday.

“What’s it matter, anyway?” she asked from the booth where she sells her mother-in-law’s ceramic crafts at the Christmas market.

“I’ve been out of work for six years now,” Kandelbinder added, “and I doubt the election is going to change that.

“It hardly matters who governs us now. Their promises are the same, and so are their lies,” she said.

“All anybody cares about is how much unification is going to cost and who has to bear the cost,” Kandelbinder said. “Well, it’s going to be the same as it always is, I can tell you now. The money will go right into the pockets of the big shots and, as usual, the little guy will be the one paying for it all.”