Bavarian Vote Bolsters Kohl’s Reelection Hopes

In electing a regional parliament Sunday, voters in Germany’s most prosperous state gave a decisive victory to Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union and with it a tail wind to Chancellor Helmut Kohl as he enters the final two weeks of his own reelection battle.

With most of the vote counted, CSU, the sister party of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union, had nearly 53% of the vote--the outright majority needed by the party to retain popular Gov. Edmund Stoiber and claim a shift in national sentiments toward Kohl’s coalition.

The left-of-center Social Democrats, whose charismatic candidate for chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, has been giving Kohl the toughest challenge of his 16-year leadership, had sought to embarrass Kohl on the die-hard conservative Bavarian turf that has been ruled by CSU politicians since 1962.

About 29% of voters Sunday supported the Social Democrats, a bit less than the opposition’s 30% showing four years ago in the last Bavarian state elections.

With as much as 40% of the federal electorate still undecided about how to vote in the ever-narrowing federal contest, the CSU victory in Bavaria was immediately heralded as evidence that the tide has turned in Kohl’s favor.

“The voters are coming back to the Union in droves!” the Christian Democrats’ campaign manager, Peter Hintze, proclaimed in Bonn.

“This result is an enormous breakthrough for the federal parliamentary elections,” Stoiber enthused as soon as the first results showed his party had held its ground against the campaigning onslaught by Schroeder.

The governor told journalists in his state capital, Munich, that Kohl had already called to congratulate him on the CSU victory and to express confidence about their coalition’s fortunes in the Sept. 27 federal elections.

While Stoiber cast the victory as one shared by state and federal political forces, he had pointedly avoided campaigning with Kohl, apparently out of fear that too close a connection with the embattled chancellor could damage his own party’s chances.

Social Democrats, predictably, disputed that the Bavarian vote offered any signals to be read about the federal elections, which polls suggest Schroeder leads by 3 to 5 percentage points. Party campaign manager Klaus Muenterfering called it “the worst showing for the CSU in 30 years.”

Sunday’s vote also eased fears throughout Germany that radical parties might gain ground while the two main parties focus on style and personality over substance. The Munich-based ultra-right Republicans polled less than 4%--well short of the 5% threshold needed to win seats in the state parliament.

The third party in Kohl’s governing coalition also fared badly in Bavaria, though. The liberal Free Democrats won less than 2%, failing again to enter the state parliament.

Only the environmentalist Greens won enough votes to join the two leading parties in the Landestag, securing about 5.5%. The Greens are expected to seek a coalition with the Social Democrats on the federal level if Kohl and his allies fail to attain a majority on Sept. 27.

Bavaria, home to 12 million people, enjoys the lowest level of unemployment of Germany’s 16 states, as well as the highest per capita income, the most capital investment and the best of the country’s tourist attractions.