Presidency : In a United Germany, a Sharp Divide : Notoriety haunts Kohl’s handpicked unity candidate as he polarizes voters far more than he reconciles their differences.

He was intended as the candidate of unity, a pious easterner who would make history as the first president elected since the two Germanys became one. Instead, Steffen Heitmann has managed to offend, shock, anger, alienate and outrage everyone from working women to Jews--and the election is still seven months away.

A Protestant pastor and lawyer in former Communist East Germany and now justice minister in Saxony state, Heitmann prefers motherhood to careers, worries about the influx of foreigners, dismisses the notion of a European super-state and believes Germans no longer should be burdened by their Nazi past.

His views have won him instant favor among archconservatives--support he resolutely eschews--and widespread notoriety elsewhere in a country where just two months ago he was virtually unknown.

“The people expect something else from their president,” said Manfred Guellner of the Forsa Institute, a polling firm that has tracked Heitmann’s rocky candidacy. “He doesn’t represent mainstream views in either the West or the East.”

Heitmann, 49, was hand-picked in August by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who said it was important to cement German unity by nominating an easterner for the ceremonial but prestigious post.

President Richard von Weizsaecker, who has promoted Germany abroad with patrician grace and served as a respected social conscience at home, must step down in May after two terms in Villa Hammerschmidt.

Kohl was also seeking a hard-line conservative, someone who would help persuade right-wing voters not to abandon his Christian Democratic Union in favor of small extremist parties as next fall’s parliamentary elections--and his own reelection bid--approach.

The demure but resolute Heitmann fit the bill. In a recent meeting with party members, he won high praise for remarks about family values, spiritual nourishment and the onset of a new epoch in German history. As for his support among far-right parties, “I can’t choose who applauds me,” he said.

His defenders say some of his public relations problems stem from his roots in the east, where people speak more directly--and naively, some westerners say--about subjects long considered sensitive in the west.

Heitmann, for example, insists that his assertion that Germans be freed from the shackles of the Third Reich does not slight Jews but rather recognizes the changed world order and Germany’s need to play a greater role in it. The leader of Germany’s small Jewish community, however, complains that it encourages anti-Semitism.

“People in the media complain that all German politicians come out of the same smooth superficial mode,” said Rolf Kiefer, party spokesman for the Christian Democrats. “Then we present someone who is different, and we get a wave of criticism that he doesn’t fit the mold.”

A recent opinion poll showed 64% of Germans believe that Heitmann should be dropped by the Christian Democrats, who nominated him Wednesday.

“He doesn’t reconcile, he polarizes,” Friedbert Pflueger, a Christian Democrat member of Parliament, wrote in a biting newspaper commentary that earned him the wrath of Kohl. “His every utterance stirs a controversy.”

Because the president is elected by a special session of local and national legislators, the ruling coalition in Bonn--made up of Christian Democrats, Christian Socialists and Free Democrats--should be able to dictate the winner.

But Kohl angered the Free Democrats by advancing Heitmann’s candidacy without first consulting them.

The tiny, defiant party has come up with its own candidate, Hildegard Hamm-Bruecher, 72, the grand dame of German politics who retired from the Bundestag three years ago. The well-known liberal is given no chance of winning, but her candidacy could help sink Heitmann by splitting the vote and handing the presidency to Johannes Rau, the popular premier of the western state of North Rhine- Westphalia and the nominee of the opposition Social Democrats.