Germans Fear Government Inertia

It may not be the stuff that drives elections here, but it certainly reflected an unusual meanness of spirit in German politics last week when word got out that one of the nation’s most respected public figures, former President Richard von Weizsaecker, had been given the bum’s rush by his own party.

Von Weizsaecker, a 77-year-old gentleman of the old school who lives in a villa in one of Berlin’s best neighborhoods, didn’t even know what had hit him until it was splashed across the tabloids: Although he was head of state from 1984 to 1994, he had been unceremoniously dropped from the rolls of the Christian Democratic Union.

The official reason: Von Weizsaecker had failed to pay his dues to the CDU, which governs Germany in a three-party coalition.

The real reason: Von Weizsaecker had had the nerve to criticize his own party in a magazine interview, saying he saw “power madness” at work within the leadership, with more energy being devoted to surviving in office than to solving the nation’s problems.

The dumping of an esteemed former president is just one sign of the depths to which politics have descended in Germany this fall with the opening of the campaign for next year’s federal elections. Good manners toward an elder statesman aren’t the only thing being abandoned in the rush for votes. So are crucial questions of public policy.

“A year of torment, caused by inertia, is upon us,” lamented Joschka Fischer, head of the environmentalist Greens party, who worries that nothing of consequence will be accomplished in Bonn for an entire year, until the next federal Parliament is chosen Sept. 27, 1998.

“The only thing I expect is that in the next 12 months, none of the decisions that we need will be made,” agreed Karl Feldmeyer, a reporter for the respected newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who covers the CDU.

During the yearlong run-up to the federal elections, there will be a series of five state and municipal elections, the first of which was held Sunday in the northern city-state of Hamburg.

The Hamburg voting was widely watched--as the results of the next four contests will be--as a harbinger of what will happen to Chancellor Helmut Kohl when the nation goes to the polls next September. Kohl has served 15 years as chancellor, and he is trying for a record fifth term.

But if Hamburg’s voters are any indication, this is a nation tired of Kohl--though not well disposed toward his opposition either.

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Kohl’s Christian Democrats won only about 31% of the vote in Hamburg, according to official results. It was a defeat, but not an awful defeat in a city that has been governed by the center-left Social Democratic Party for the last 40 years.

But the Social Democrats managed to get only about 36% of the vote, such a dismal showing that Mayor Henning Voscherau, running for reelection, promptly resigned.

“This is a bitter disappointment for me,” he said. “The results are no proof of confidence in me, or in my party.”

The weak showing for the Social Democrats reflected their failure, at the federal level, to present a convincing economic-policy alternative to Kohl’s rule. Nor do they have anyone like Britain’s Tony Blair--a charismatic new leader who can rally the worn-out rank and file.

“The opposition is not prepared,” Feldmeyer said. “If the [federal] elections were held this weekend, they could not answer the question of who their candidate is.”

In the absence of fresh ideas and new blood, the campaign season is proving one of near-total policy paralysis. Kohl, who announced in April that he will seek his fifth term, hasn’t been able to push through a single major initiative since. The Social Democrats, who control the upper house of Parliament, are blocking any important bill that comes their way.

Their main success has been to frustrate Kohl’s plans for sweeping tax reform, launched in January and designed to yield tax cuts worth up to $17 billion a year beginning in 1999. Other Kohl ideas, such as the restructuring of the nation’s underfinanced state pension system and the reduction of non-wage labor costs, have also been halted.

Even an attempt to simplify the official rules of German spelling and punctuation is stalled.

And with his programs in trouble, Kohl is showing signs of an inability to control his own coalition. One junior partner, the Free Democratic Party, unhelpfully spent the summer fighting his tax policies. And the other, the Bavaria-based Christian Social Union, has been flirting with opposition to the upcoming European currency union, a goal upon which Kohl has staked his career.

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The coming year of likely gridlock might conceivably be tolerable if all was well in the German economic house. But it isn’t. Unemployment is at a postwar record of 12%, Germany is sliding lower on international competitiveness indexes, and the economic gap between the former East and West remains wide.

One recent poll suggested that if the German business class had its way, it would replace the hapless Kohl with another CDU member, Kurt Biedenkopf. A former West German, Biedenkopf is now the highly popular governor of the former Eastern state of Saxony--and perhaps Kohl’s most formidable antagonist within the CDU.

Could Biedenkopf stage a palace coup and save the governing party from an exhausted chancellor? Informed observers say that Biedenkopf doesn’t have the support.

Short of such an internal revolt, there is almost no mechanism in Germany for removing a head of government before his elected term runs out. And divided though Kohl’s governing coalition is, it seems unlikely to come undone at the moment, because the smaller partners aren’t willing to risk losing power by jumping ship.

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That means that Kohl’s Christian Democrats are likely to stay where they are for Greens party leader Fischer’s forthcoming “year of torment”--and then lose next September’s elections.

Feldmeyer, the journalist, said he thinks Kohl knows all this and has decided to sacrifice everything for the sake of his heart’s keenest desire, Europe’s currency unification. The idea of abandoning the trusted mark for the untested euro isn’t popular in Germany, but Kohl, old enough to have experienced the horror of the last world war, sees the unification of Europe as an honorable and necessary way of preventing another war.

“He wants to realize the euro, not as a currency but as the point of no return of the fusion of the Western European countries into one state,” Feldmeyer said. “And to realize that, he is willing to sacrifice everything else, including the chance to become chancellor again.”