GERMANY : Kohl’s Popularity Is in a Free Fall : The chancellor was riding high after engineering unification. But now . . .

Few Western leaders in recent years have fallen, scandal-free, further and faster from public favor than German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The glow from his skilled management of German unification, the euphoria of his landslide in last December’s national elections and the confident predictions that he would emerge as Europe’s voice of the 1990s have disappeared.

Instead, barely 4 1/2 months into his new four-year term, the triumphant chancellor of German unification is confronted with embarrassing probing: How much longer can he last? Is he burned out?

Such questions, whispered in the corridors of power here in recent weeks, have become the stuff of leading media editorials following a humiliating election setback last Sunday, when Kohl’s Christian Democrats were routed by the opposition Social Democrats in his home state of Rhineland-Palatinate. That state had been a traditional stronghold of the chancellor’s party since the re-establishment of German democracy after World War II.

To be sure, Sunday’s electoral defeat followed a miserable few months for the chancellor in which he bungled issue after issue.

The collapse of the economy in the east and the fact it took Kohl four months after his election victory to set foot in the region has made his lofty campaign optimism a sick joke among east Germans.

His reneging on a key election pledge not to raise taxes to finance unity has left west Germans equally unhappy. Germans don’t call the extra withholding from their paychecks resulting from the tax hike a “surcharge” or “unity fee;” they label it simply, “the tax lie.”

In foreign affairs, Kohl’s indecision in the early days of the Gulf War and later equivocal support for the allied effort have cost him and his nation dearly in leadership and respect within the Atlantic Alliance.

Despite all this, however, it would seem premature to write Kohl’s political obituary. Writing him off has become a kind of national pastime during the last decade among German political pundits. But most of them underestimate his inherent skill and sheer tenacity.

“I’ll fight every battle necessary to carry out my mandate,” Kohl replied to a television interviewer earlier this week who asked whether he had grown tired of governing.

With a comfortable 54-seat majority in the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, and a divided opposition that lacks credibility, many believe Kohl won’t have to fight all that hard to keep his job.

For Kohl, as for Margaret Thatcher when she was Britain’s prime minister, the only real potential threat to his power would seem to come from within the ranks of his own party. But unlike Thatcher, who fell victim to a coup launched by her own Conservatives last year, Kohl’s grip on his party is hard to exaggerate.

Despite nine years as chancellor, he has never lost touch with the party’s grass roots, nurturing loyalty by frequently intervening to resolve local disputes or by smoothing the way for minor officials.

This loyalty helped him undermine an attempt by a group of senior Christian Democrats to dump him in the summer of 1989, a time when Kohl’s public opinion ratings were so low that many within the party believed his continued presence endangered its electoral chances in 1990.

Party insiders believe that loyalty makes another putsch attempt highly unlikely. But, paradoxically, Kohl’s dominance of the party also carries its dangers.

After nearly a decade in power, he and the group surrounding him at the head of the party are seen as more conservative than the mainstream of the party membership and the general public on key social issues.