Kohl’s Coalition Favored as Germans Vote Today : Election: Chancellor stands for peace and stability, his main rival Scharping for jobs and social justice.

Continuity or change. The old, post-World War II generation or the new ‘60s breed. Those are the options in the German federal election today, when voters must choose whether to return conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl to office for a fourth term or replace him with the younger Social Democrat, Rudolf Scharping.

Kohl, 64, who aspires to become Germany’s longest-serving chancellor since the war, has barnstormed the country with such optimism that he already has journalists asking if he plans to run again in 1998.

Scharping, meanwhile, seeks to be the Bill Clinton of Germany, a 46-year-old pragmatist leading his party back to power after 12 years in the back seat. Enough is enough, he says. It’s time for a change.

The Kohl camp is betting that, no matter how much Germany’s 60 million voters might worry and complain, ultimately they will choose the status quo. “No German government ever has lost power in an election,” a confident senior government official said. “Never has a challenger replaced an incumbent through an open election.”

Most of the latest polls give a slight advantage to Kohl’s three-party coalition, made up of the Christian Democratic Union; its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the liberal Free Democratic Party.

But there are enough wild cards in the multi-party race that the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel has prepared five possible cover stories for its Monday edition. And the weekly newspaper Die Woche asks in a headline if there will be “A Chancellor Change?”

The yearlong campaign has been an American-style competition of personalities over issues: The veteran statesman Kohl versus the bearded Scharping, who quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Kohl stands for peace and stability, Scharping for jobs and social justice.

The business community clearly prefers Kohl. And despite the prevailing issue of “change,” neither candidate has spoken of making any radical changes in Germany’s existing economic or foreign policies, especially its relationship with the United States.

Neither man, though, will have the votes to govern alone, and Germany’s small parties ultimately will determine who rules a coalition government.

With two ballots each to elect a Parliament, Germans vote for a deputy in their district and for a political party. Elected deputies are guaranteed a seat if their party gets 5% of the national vote; the party list vote determines the overall percentage of seats each party gets. The chancellor is then picked in Parliament by the largest party or the party that can control the most seats in alliance with others.

For decades, the kingmakers have been the Free Democrats. They helped bring Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt to power in 1969, and brought his party down again in 1982 when they switched sides to the Christian Democrats, putting Kohl in office.

The liberals have vowed to go with Kohl again, but they failed to win legislative seats in the last six state elections, raising questions about their viability in the federal vote. Can they scrape together the 5% minimum needed to win seats in Parliament?

If the liberals fail to make the cut, or if the two parties together fall short of a clear majority, Kohl could be forced into a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats. This option, last tried in the 1960s, is a last resort for both sides.

“No one really wants it,” said Stephan Kornelius, political reporter for the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “A grand coalition increases the extreme parties on the left and right. In the middle term, it will harm both of the big parties.”

The “extreme” vote is another uncertainty for Kohl, who ran a Cold War, anti-Communist campaign. Although the ultra-rightist Republikaner Party almost certainly will not make it into Parliament, the reformed Communist Party of East Germany, now called the Party of Democratic Socialism, has a shot under the leadership of its top candidate, Gregor Gysi, whom many consider to be Germany’s most dynamic politician.

Polls show that the PDS has less than 5% support nationwide but strength in several eastern districts. Under a quirk in the election law, if it wins three districts it could take up to 27 seats in the 656-seat Bundestag.

The Social Democrats sought to form a government with the ecological Greens Party, which is expected to win its way back into the Bundestag today after losing out in 1990. The two parties alone are not likely to have enough votes to govern, and the question of whether they would ally with the PDS became a campaign issue.

Kohl hammered the Social Democrats for forming a state government in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this year with the support of the former Communists. His attacks forced Scharping to say he would not turn to the PDS to form a federal government.

The key may be in the question of change. At the beginning of the campaign season, more than half of all voters said they wanted a change in government. Now, according to the pollsters at the Allensbach Institute, only 46% say they do. And it takes more than that to oust Kohl.