Kohl Set to Solidify Role as Europe’s Strongest Leader : Germany: Today’s vote is expected to make him the unified nation’s first freely elected chancellor since 1932.

Barring an unexpected major upset, today will mark Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s greatest triumph.

The latest public opinion polls give Kohl’s center-right coalition parties leads of about 20 percentage points in today’s German election--an expected historic vote that will make him the first freely elected all-German chancellor since 1932.

The vote will also establish Kohl as the most powerful, influential European leader of the early 1990s, at a time when the Continent embarks on a new era laden as much with hope as anxiety.

The idea that the 60-year-old Rhinelander--often dismissed in the past as a dull, provincial pol who managed to become a mediocre West German chancellor--should be flirting with the image of global statesman is little less than astounding to those who have followed his career.

Of Bonn’s six chancellors since 1949, none seemed more ill-suited or less destined for such a role.

Colorless, plodding, predictable, uninspiring, clumsy--these were the words used to sum up the first seven of Kohl’s eight years as West Germany’s leader.

The assessment by the late Bavarian chieftain Franz Josef Strauss that Kohl was “totally incapable of the chancellorship” may have been overdrawn but not by much, Bonn pundits agreed.

Then, the Berlin Wall collapsed and Kohl came of age.

Today, after one of the most remarkably successful years a politician could ever hope to enjoy, Kohl has been propelled to the threshold of greatness--on the verge of a new electoral mandate, his place in history already guaranteed as the man who, more than any other, shaped German unity.

“He surprised us all,” admitted Thomas Kielinger, editor of the Bonn-based Rheinischer Merkur weekly newspaper. “He was the procrastinator, the man whose style was to wait others out, but suddenly he took everyone by storm. He showed he was prepared to lead, not be dragged along by history.”

Within 19 days of the Berlin Wall’s collapse in November, 1989, Kohl had seized the initiative with a 10-point program for eventual German unity. In retrospect, it looks modest, but at the time it was stunning in its boldness.

During the ensuing months, he rejected expert advice and ordered a swift currency union that became the first major step in the unification process. He kept Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher from accepting a Soviet plan that would have limited German sovereignty after unity. He ignored those who wanted to slow the rush toward unity and pushed relentlessly onward.

In the process, his popularity rocketed.

A senior Western diplomat directly involved in negotiating the external aspects of unity commented: “Nobody in the past year had a chance to put a foot wrong more often than did Helmut Kohl, but in the vast majority of instances he was right.”

Buoyed by his achievements, the chancellor has floated above the campaign rhetoric, all but ignoring his demoralized Social Democratic opponents and showing signs of becoming a kind of benign father figure.

His campaign speeches have carried the ring of political sermons to his newly united people.

He has lectured affluent western Germans against arrogance toward their struggling eastern cousins and assured eastern Germans that their region, too, will soon bloom. He has urged grandparents to sit their grandchildren down and tell them that the West German economic recovery of the 1950s was no “economic miracle” but the fruit of plain, hard work.

He also warns all of a united Germany’s new responsibilities to the more expectant world around it.

“We’re now 80 million strong. We’re the strongest economic power in Europe, and it’s important not to forget that,” he told an election rally of his Christian Democratic Union in this well-heeled market town 50 miles north of Frankfurt am Main last week. “We should be ready to help others--not just because of our economic capability. It’s our moral duty to do this.”

The faithful loved it. The nation responded.

As emergency aid packages flooded eastward to a foundering Soviet Union last week in Germany’s biggest-ever relief effort, Kohl was giving his compatriots something unusual: They were feeling good about themselves.

Although it was the old East Bloc’s revolutions of 1989 that gave Kohl the chance to shape history, it was his own razor-sharp political instincts that enabled him to understand the fast-moving events more quickly that other politicians.

Ironically, it is Kohl’s thick Palatinate-accented German and shirt-sleeve manner--so often ridiculed in the more urbane drawing rooms of German power--that give him such a close rapport with the average citizen.

In a style similar to that of Lyndon B. Johnson, Kohl loves to mix with friends at the grass roots, both in his home region and within his party.

His old school friends include a parish priest, a doctor and a barkeeper. They remain his preferred company.

His idea of relaxing is walking with friends in the woods surrounding his home in suburban Ludwigshafen and some lively back-fence jawing with locals. Stories abound of Kohl slipping away for a drink with his chauffeur or bodyguards.

“He likes to be with people who aren’t involved in politics,” noted Edward Ackermann, a longtime media adviser in the chancellery. “It gives him another view.”

He did the same on private trips to East Germany. While visiting relatives of his Leipzig-born wife, Hannalore, Kohl forged similar personal contacts.

This other, close-up view helped him remain master of events.

Editor Kielinger said Kohl and former Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt were the two leaders to first understand the direction of last autumn’s East German revolution. But he added that Brandt, by then an elder statesman and hamstrung by internal party differences, was incapable of doing much.

As Kohl’s opponents tried to adjust to his initial 10-point plan that for the first time raised the subject of eventual unity in a matter of years, Kohl was already compressing the time frame.

Again, it was no abstract analysis that led him to this decision, but his own instincts, alerted 10 minutes into a euphoric reception he received last Dec. 19 upon arrival in the East German city of Dresden.

“Already at the airport, it was clear to me that there could be no transitional period, that the (Communist) regime was at an end,” he said.

Kohl, the second of two sons in a strict Roman Catholic family, was born in the Rhine industrial port of Ludwigshafen two years before Hitler came to power. He has always stayed close to his roots.

Despite his years in Bonn, the Ludwigshafen suburb of Oggersheim remains home.

In the last two months, he has dragged both President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev there for visits and subjected them to the local specialty of saumagen --literally, a pig’s belly stuffed with a mix of pork, potato, spices and sausage meat.

“This is where I grew up, where I have my friends and where my parents are buried,” he explained to reporters during the Gorbachev trip. “I know every street and every corner.” He was 15 when the war ended. He earned a doctorate in history at Heidelberg University before entering politics in the rolling hills west of the Rhine in his home state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

At 25, he was elected to the state’s Christian Democratic leadership group. By age 33, he had become the country’s youngest state party chairman, and three years later, he was the state’s premier, equivalent to governor.

As he would do later at the national level, he turned the party into his personal power base, reviewing even minor appointments, so that, as one newspaper recently commented, “No school principal got his job without knowing whom to thank.”

As chancellor and emerging world statesman, Kohl remains anchored to simple, homespun values--a plastic statue of Mother Teresa on his desk, his door always open to a local party leader in need of advice, with loyalty the unspoken quid pro quo.

“If there’s a crisis in a county-level party organization, the leader knows he can phone Kohl directly, and if he needs time, he’ll get half an hour with the chancellor to work out what’s wrong,” commented Kohl’s main domestic liaison, Wolfgang Bergsdorf. “If there’s a choice between taking a call from a local party head or a foreign dignitary, he chooses the party.”

“Kohl is like a landed gentleman who has become king,” Theo Sommer, editor of the respected liberal weekly Die Zeit, observed in a recent article. “He distributes the spoils of power to his followers but demands absolute loyalty in return. His intellectual critics have never understood that is the key to his secret.”

Until the challenge of German unity was thrust upon him just over a year ago, his successes as chancellor were modest. He implemented tax, social security and health reforms. He kept the country out of trouble.

He stubbornly faced down long months of major peace protests in 1983 to deploy U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles, as West Germany had promised its allies it would do.

Two years later, he just as doggedly held an embarrassed President Ronald Reagan to a promise to visit a World War II German war cemetery, even after graves of soldiers who served in Hitler’s elite SS units were discovered there.

For Kohl, that wasn’t the point. All were draftees, all were victims of war, he argued. What he wanted from Reagan was that German war dead be treated as those of any other nation.

Such normality, he consistently claims, is an elemental part of political stability.

A similar desire is behind Kohl’s persistent efforts to instill a benign kind of patriotism into younger Germans, urging them to learn and sing the national anthem and be proud of the national flag.

The proclamation of Oct. 3, the day unity occurred, as united Germany’s national day especially pleased Kohl.

“We’ve now got a really good national holiday at a beautiful time of year, a national holiday on which no one has to give funeral speeches but where you can really celebrate,” he said in a recent interview.

Although Kohl won reelection in 1987, the Christian Democratic vote total declined, and just over a year ago, a small group within the party plotted an abortive attempt to dump him.

Even as Kohl moved to repair the damage within his own party, the tides of history were rising to lift him above such unseemly disputes.

Editor Sommer of Die Zeit summed it up: “Helmut Kohl . . . is the chancellor of German unity. He made it happen--and it rescued him.”