German Leader’s Party Loses Another Election

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats on Sunday suffered their sixth straight setback in state elections since taking power a year ago, but they proclaimed themselves relieved that the Berlin vote was not as humiliating as earlier referendums on the government’s modest reforms.

Since Schroeder defeated conservative Helmut Kohl with a vow to unite Germans in “a new middle,” his attempts to drag a tax-strangled and over-regulated economy into the age of global competition have been thwarted by political infighting and a nationwide case of cold feet.

The Social Democrats and the environmentalist Greens with whom they share power at the federal level lost badly to Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union--and in some cases even to the former Communists of eastern Germany--in Hesse, Bremen, Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony earlier this year. Party loyalists’ fears of an even more brutal drubbing in Berlin, one of Germany’s 16 states, soared after vitriolic attacks on Schroeder’s character by his former finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, and rumors that Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping had ambitions to replace him.

The Social Democrats’ 22.4% share of the Berlin vote was their worst showing in this traditional party bastion since modern Germany was founded amid the ruins of Nazism in 1949. But in the wake of preelection forecasts that the Christian Democrats could win an outright majority and drop the Social Democrats from Berlin’s “grand coalition,” Schroeder’s political strategists were breathing audible sighs of relief.

“The party is coming up from the bottom,” said a confident Franz Muentefering, who ran Schroeder’s successful campaign for chancellor last year and was recently appointed business manager of the Social Democratic Party.

Juergen Trittin, federal environment minister from the Greens party, agreed that the Berlin results were “not pretty . . . but we can be pleased to have trimmed the size of our losses of recent months.”

The Greens lost nearly 4 percentage points from the 1995 Berlin elections, drawing only 10% and trailing the reformed Communists, known as the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS. Mayor Eberhard Diepgen cast his Christian Democrats’ 40.5% of the vote as an endorsement of the partnership that has governed Berlin for the past eight years, and dismissed his earlier predictions of winning an outright majority as mere expressions of “one’s right to dream.”

The bigger winners, in comparison with the last Berlin vote, were the reformed Communists, who captured nearly 18% of the citywide vote and an impressive 40% in the eastern districts.

“The PDS is now accepted as the party of social justice in the west of the city as well,” effused party chief Lothar Bisky, although the party won only 4.5% in precincts that were on the western side of the Berlin Wall during the age of division.

Polls had even hinted that the Social Democrats--long the dominant force here when the late Willy Brandt was Berlin’s mayor--might finish third behind the ex-Communists.

The Social Democrats and the Greens took power in October 1998 after a campaign promising to create a new center that could accommodate both traditional union-backed leftists and more business-oriented conservative voters. But every attempt at loosening the restraints on employers and entrepreneurs has resulted in a public backlash and accusations that the new forces in power are betraying the people.

Only three months ago, Schroeder and his Cabinet were being praised at home and abroad for masterful handling of the Kosovo crisis. Despite staunchly pacifist sentiment in this country, which instigated two world wars, Schroeder, Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer managed to guide German troops into armed conflict for the first time in more than half a century with honor.

But internal bickering among Social Democrats that culminated with the resignation of Lafontaine in March has flared anew with the release this month of a vitriolic memoir by the former finance minister, along with damaging claims by respected German media that Scharping has openly disputed whether the chancellor can handle his job.

Scharping, who was the party’s unsuccessful 1994 challenger to Kohl, vehemently denied in an interview published on the eve of the elections that he harbors ambitions to replace Schroeder.

“Let me say this crystal clear: I want him to succeed,” Scharping told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday.

In a speech the day before, Schroeder himself warned the party against engaging in such destructive intrigues.

“There is no way the Social Democrats can afford to lead a controversial debate about personnel in the current conditions,” the chancellor warned his party.

Lafontaine’s bitter recriminations in “The Heart Beats Left,” a book serialized in newspapers here ahead of its Wednesday appearance on store shelves, have been dismissed as sour grapes from a has-been, but the persistent reports of a Schroeder-Scharping feud have clearly cost the party credibility and support.

Schroeder has run afoul of his party’s left wing by backing Finance Minister Hans Eichel’s imposition of $17 billion in government budget cuts, which mandate trimming Germany’s now-lavish unemployment, welfare and retirement benefits. While the proposals have won over even some of the more pragmatic Greens in the political hierarchy, they have outraged labor unions and traditional tax-and-spend socialists like Lafontaine.

Usually a solid backer of the Social Democrats, the giant IG Metall trade union has been demanding a lowering of the retirement age from 65 to 60 as “compensation” from Schroeder for what the blue-collar ranks see as his defection to the right.

Some German media analysts interpret Schroeder’s unshaken backing for the budget cuts as a showdown with the remnants of Lafontaine’s camp. The chancellor’s strategy, they believe, is to loosen the shackles on employers so they can create more jobs and bolster an economic turnaround in time for the next federal elections in 2002.