Germans Trip Up Schroeder No Matter What He Tries to Do

So, after 16 years under the conservative guidance of Helmut Kohl, Germans wanted change, did they?

Just over three months into power, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his new center-left government have been slapped down by hidebound citizens for virtually every attempted social, economic or political revision.

When the 54-year-old Social Democrat and his coalition partners, the environmentalist Greens, proclaimed that the generation of nuclear power would cease next year, Germans jumped all over them for meddling in private industry and international contracts, forcing the embarrassed new leadership into an about-face.

When Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the Greens wondered aloud whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should renounce its Cold War-era claim that it has the right to make first use of nuclear arms, NATO officials and German conservatives were so alarmed over the leftist musings that Schroeder quickly beat a strategic retreat.

“The solidarity within NATO is not open to question,” the chancellor assured NATO allies at a conference here last weekend, a position he reportedly repeated to President Clinton on Thursday during a meeting at the White House.

Most dramatic of the government’s failed efforts to lead in a new direction, though, has been the now-troubled plan to lower barriers to German citizenship for the more than 7 million foreign residents of the country.

Public recoil from the idea of allowing dual citizenship has been so strong that it will cost Schroeder’s governing coalition its slim but vital majority in the upper house of Parliament, the Federal Council. Voters in the key state of Hesse, home to Germany’s powerful financial sector, ousted the Social Democrats and Greens in an election Sunday that became a referendum on the controversial citizenship changes.

“There will be a compromise,” a rattled Schroeder said after the surprising Hesse defeat, drawing protests from the Greens. “We need a consensus in society about how to integrate our foreign citizens.”

Yet it is precisely the absence of social consensus on what is wrong with Germany that has undermined the new government’s endeavors to fix it.

Schroeder presented himself during the autumn election campaign as the leader of a new centrist force that “would not make everything different, but many things better.” In reality, little has improved economically, while much threatens to become radically different as Schroeder shares power with the decidedly leftist Greens. The declared ban on generating nuclear power, the drift from NATO and the offering of passports to millions of foreigners leave voters feeling betrayed by the campaign promises that the tinkering would occur softly, softly.

“Germans don’t like change. That’s why they voted [in September] for the party that promised there would be none,” says Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s former foreign policy advisor, explaining why Germans so soon are feeling uncomfortable with their decision to go with Schroeder.

Now unlikely to get his tax and labor reforms pushed through the deadlocked Federal Council, Schroeder finds himself in the precarious position of being unable to deliver on the programs that he, as a candidate, promised would be his priority.

In an interview Wednesday with Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich newspaper, Schroeder conceded error in letting the Greens have their way on divisive minor issues before tackling the matters of concern to voters: more jobs and lower taxes. The Greens also have acknowledged their role in the setbacks.

Still facing elections in six of Germany’s 16 states this year, the government could find itself stopped before it gets started if loss of the Federal Council majority so early in its tenure means the opposition parties can block the government’s program for chipping away at 11.5% unemployment--one of the few things Germans would like to see change.