Kohl to Make Bid for 5th Term as German Chancellor

Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced Thursday that he will seek an unprecedented fifth term when Germans go to the polls next year, cutting short a popular guessing game about whether Europe’s most senior head of government would run again--and intensifying a more serious debate about whether Kohl will still have the dynamism to push through tough reforms that Europe’s biggest economy needs.

“Quite clearly, yes!” Kohl exclaimed, with an I-thought-you’d-never-ask smile, when two interviewers asked him the big question during his traditional Easter-season television appearance.

The beefy chancellor takes a spring vacation in Austria each year, where he goes on a diet, contemplates major issues in relative seclusion and then emerges to give a lengthy televised interview. He appeared on Germany’s public ARD television Thursday, his 67th birthday.

Kohl revealed his plans for a fifth candidacy near the end of a half-hour session in which he broke little new ground on the subject foremost in German minds these days: jobs. Official unemployment here is 12.8% and rising every month, the highest percentage since the Great Depression.

Many analysts worry that a sizable percentage of those jobless are long-term unemployed--people who will never find work unless there are radical changes in Germany’s generous pay structures, social benefits and working conditions.

These worker-friendly but costly policies are making it difficult for German businesses to compete in an era of increasing globalization. But Kohl has run into a solid wall of union opposition in recent months as his government has tried to push through limited benefit cuts and changes in hiring-and-firing rules.

He mainly reiterated his current policies and said he hopes to see improvement in the unemployment figures by next year.

Kohl said he decided to seek another term after more than 15 years in office because of the “difficult international developments” Germany is facing. He cited the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the creation of a common currency for the European Union, scheduled for 1999.

Although Kohl’s handling of such heavyweight international matters has won him the respect of leaders around the world, it is not winning him points at home at the moment: Voters are more worried about bread-and-butter issues than about seemingly abstract foreign affairs.

Polls indicate, for instance, that to the extent ordinary Germans care about the common European currency at all, they worry mainly that by working toward it--particularly with spending cuts--Germany is undermining its own public interests.

Not surprisingly, opposition politicians jumped Thursday at the new chance Kohl was giving them to criticize his handling of the economy and to predict that he will lose next year’s election.

“Highly decent,” said the left-of-center Greens’ Juergen Tritten of Kohl’s announcement. “Now people will have the chance to call to account the person responsible for the highest unemployment since 1933 and vote him out of office.”

But Kohl’s critics have predicted his downfall before, and he has always proved them wrong. Already he has outlasted every modern German leader except Count Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century “Iron Chancellor” who held onto power for 19 years and two months.

*

Now, fears about the economy, and a feeling that the government is drifting instead of taking decisive action, are eating away at Kohl’s popularity. A February poll showed that--for the first time in his current electoral period--a majority didn’t want him to run again.

Another survey this week showed that if elections were held now, Kohl’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party would get only 34% of the vote, while the center-left Social Democrats would get 40%, enough to form a coalition government with the Greens, with 12%.

Still, the Social Democrats have so far failed to come up with a charismatic candidate for chancellor who would provide a clear alternative to Kohl.