POLITICS : Kohl’s Stock Falling in Bonn--but He Has Breathing Space

The sight of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in political hot water is nothing new.

For much of his near decade-long tenure in office, pundits in Bonn have jumped to write the political obituary of a leader whom they love to portray as a coarse bumbler whose only real gift as a politician is a unique ability to sit out the many crises he’s stumbled into.

In recent weeks, with Kohl’s stock seeming to slip as fast as the problems surrounding unification multiply around him, predictions of his political demise have taken on a new intensity.

“He’s lost touch,” said opposition Social Democratic parliamentary leader Hans-Ulrich Klose. “He’s over the hill.” Concluded former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in a recent magazine interview, “The government has lost its way.”

Despite his problems, two important facts work for Kohl:

* His center-right coalition, however battered, holds a comfortable parliamentary majority of 67 seats in the 662-member Bundestag and seems to have little choice but to hold together.

* In the wake of recent, embarrassing state election results--which saw the rise of right-wing splinter parties and which saw his Christian Democrats lose power in their western stronghold of Baden-Wurttemberg--Kohl has an almost unprecedented breathing space of two years before the next major test, a state election in Lower Saxony.

While Kohl will likely survive until the next parliamentary elections, now planned for the end of 1994, there are several indicators that recent events have weakened his government.

Although an ability to draw high-quality people has long been seen as one of his great strengths, Kohl in the last two months has lost two of his most valued and experienced Cabinet colleagues: Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, through scandal; and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who many believed resigned because he saw the handwriting on the wall.

Both have been replaced by men seen as inexperienced second-raters. The new foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, left a mediocre impression as justice minister, while Volker Ruehe carries the image of a Kohl “yes-man” to his defense post.

Kohl’s insistence for two years that unification would require no great sacrifices of the German people initially carried the earmarks of a man whistling in the dark, then of someone refusing to admit the enormousness of the task facing the nation.

The result has sown resentment and deepened the country’s division.

Beset with these difficulties, Kohl over the next few months faces a highly sensitive parliamentary debate on abortion that is certain to place new strains on his coalition. In theory, the debate is to find an all-German compromise that can bridge the distance between the Communist-era holdover law in the eastern states that basically allows abortion on demand during the first three months of pregnancy and a tough western law that makes abortion all but impossible.

In reality, a majority of leaders from Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the Bavarian sister party, the Christian Socialists, want a law even stricter than the one in western Germany.