EUROPE : Kohl May Be Pushing Boulder Uphill in Tough Election Year

Germany’s marathon election year begins Sunday with a state Parliament vote in Lower Saxony that Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union is virtually certain to lose.

Yet Kohl has been barnstorming the northern state, trying to stave off a snowball effect from the first of 19 votes that will culminate in a general election on Oct. 16.

The chancellor, an underdog in his own reelection bid, is reading the polls that give his center-right party 38% of the vote in Lower Saxony and define victory as anything exceeding 35%.

“Kohl is concentrating on the October election and putting aside everything that might disturb the picture,” said Martin Sueskind, Bonn bureau chief of the Munich daily Suddeutsche Zeitung. But he added, “The feeling of the people is that the CDU is on a downhill course and (that) the bandwagon will be against them when they are defeated in Lower Saxony.”

The Christian Democrats governed Lower Saxony for 14 years before losing to a coalition of the left-of-center Social Democratic Party and the Greens ecologists in 1990. The state’s Social Democratic minister president, Gerhard Schroeder, is a popular figure who just might lead his party to an absolute majority on Sunday.

An outright victory in Lower Saxony would boost the chances of the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor, Rudolf Scharping, who now leads Kohl in opinion polls.

Political observers are watching Lower Saxony also to see if extreme rightist parties or new independent parties of the center right attract the discontented.

The main issue in the state and federal campaigns is the economy, and on that score the Christian Democrats are in bad shape. Germany is in the throes of the worst recession since its postwar economic miracle took off. The German welfare state is shrinking, and reunification has turned out to be far more costly than Kohl had promised.

Unemployment is running 10.5% nationwide and 17.1% in the former East Germany. Kohl fought for reunification and won reelection in 1990 with the help of eastern voters. But now, eastern disaffection could tip the scales against him. In the eastern Brandenburg local elections in December, his party came in third behind the former Communists.

But Kohl is a wily, combative politician with a knack for comebacks, and few political observers are willing to write him off after 12 years in office. At his party’s congress in Hamburg last month, Kohl quashed talk of an internal coup, telling his rivals to fight then and there or not at all.

Kohl is appealing to rightists with issues such as patriotism and family values and emphasizing his foreign policy experience over the economy. He is counting on voters to act conservatively in troubled times.

“Lower Saxony is one part of the puzzle, but you don’t know what the whole picture looks like,” said an official close to Kohl. He added that Germans feel freer to protest in a local election than in a federal ballot.

The Christian Democrats rule nationally in a coalition with the smaller Free Democratic Party. Some in Kohl’s camp fear that if the Social Democrats do not win Lower Saxony outright, they could seek a coalition with the Free Democrats and set, one aide said, an “uncalled-for example” for the national election.

There has been talk in political circles that the national election results could be so divided that the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would be forced into a “grand coalition” or co-government. Both Kohl and Scharping are trying to avoid that.

Scharping is attempting to persuade the electorate that his party is centrist, united and capable of governing--not a perennial, bickering bridesmaid.

He is buoyed by the polls that say Germans want change. In one poll published Thursday by the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, 60% of more than 1,000 Germans surveyed nationally said they want a change in the federal government in October. Discontent was clearly higher in the east, with 73% saying they want change compared with 57% in the west.