Germans Worry About Leaders’ Moral Compass

As scandalous revelations of money-laundering and bribe-taking shake the very foundation of Germany’s post-World War II political system, the casualty count grows ever higher in tarnished legacies and shattered careers.

* Helmut Kohl, the “father of German unity,” forever disgraced for hiding secret bank accounts and holding himself above the law.

* Johannes Rau, the president of Germany and gray eminence of the ruling Social Democratic Party, under a cloud for jet-setting on the tab of a bank in the state he used to govern.

* Wolfgang Schaeuble, only last autumn seen as the next chancellor of Germany, forced to resign as head of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, for taking illegal contributions and repeatedly changing his story.

* Roland Koch, sitting governor of Hesse state and the country’s financial empire in Frankfurt, under intensifying pressure to leave office for his own role in the finance scandal.

Accusations of moral and legal wrongdoing have been steamrollering once-sterling reputations for three months now, eroding Germans’ confidence in the trustworthiness of their politicians and raising the question of just what kind of democracy has been built over the Communist rubble and the Nazi ashes.

Especially for eastern Germans, who have long harbored doubts about the capitalist system that supplanted dictatorship a decade ago, faith in the moral compass guiding their reunified country has been badly undermined.

The CDU handed Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats defeat after defeat in seven state elections in 1999 and had been expected to run away with both state votes this year, in Schleswig-Holstein next Sunday and in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state, in May. But the CDU’s standing in the polls has tumbled by more than 30 percentage points since the first reports of financial shenanigans emerged in autumn.

“The biggest problem with our political system is that the opposition is now too weak. It is too busy dealing with its internal crisis to do its job of challenging the government,” said Thilo Streit, a researcher and analyst at the Institute for German and European Party Law in Hagen.

Like most political observers, Streit laments the damage inflicted on Germany’s image as a law-abiding nation and the loss of trust with which most Germans regarded their political figures. But he points to the very headline-grabbing, breast-beating, all-consuming nature of the current scandal as evidence that the bedrock of democracy is unbroken.

“The fact that all this information is coming out is proof that the democratic system, in the end, is working,” Streit said. “The press is doing its job in bringing all these details to light, and the public is doing its job in letting it influence who they will vote for.”

While the democratic foundation may be weathering the political earthquakes, Germans are clearly worried about their place in the world. These fears were most apparent in recent newspaper articles written by Schroeder for several European newspapers in which he sought to assure Germany’s neighbors and trading partners that his country’s reliability and respect for law are intact.

“Parliament has played its role in investigating and assessing the irregularities and illegal practices perfectly,” Schroeder wrote. “The government has not for a moment been distracted from its political program by the public fuss about the opposition party’s affairs.”

But industry leaders have begun to disagree and urge the country’s politicians to get their act together.

“All this undermines trust in our country,” complained Hans Peter Stihl, president of the German Council of Trade and Industry, after Schaeuble was forced to resign Wednesday, six weeks after admitting he was party to the financial misdeeds.

Schroeder’s assurances to the outside world that all in German democracy was basically in order preceded more recent revelations, which have tainted the Social Democrats as well as Kohl’s party. Investigative reporting by some of Germany’s biggest newspapers and magazines revealed in recent weeks that Rau accepted free flights and vacations from a bank in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he was governor until last year, violating regulations against gifts to officials that can be construed as kickbacks.

Kohl’s predecessor as chancellor, Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, also recently admitted that he funneled as much as $20 million from anonymous donors to democratic parties in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s. The transfers were “not at all uncommon” in that Cold War climate, the current treasurer of Schroeder’s party, Inge Wettig-Danielmeier, told journalists.

That “everybody does it” attitude among the western politicians is at the core of eastern Germans’ dismay over the current political crisis. With unemployment near 20% in the five eastern states that reunified with the west in 1990, dissatisfaction with the meager economic results is now intensified by the apparent weakness of the leaders’ democratic commitment.

“This is the West German political system that we eastern Germans were always told was superior to ours, and we believed that,” said Peter-Michael Diestel, an attorney and CDU member from the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin.

The party scandal is exponentially damaging in the east, he argued, because the post-Communist system has had less than a decade to develop. He added that many eastern Germans viewed Kohl as a veritable savior and that his dramatic fall from grace has shaken their confidence in their own judgment.

“This has inflicted serious damage to German democracy. No one knows who to trust or what to believe. Just look at the case of [Hesse state CDU leader Manfred] Kanther. Here is a man who was supposed to be Mr. Law and Order,” Diestel said of the former Kohl interior minister who is suspected of money-laundering. Investigators seized files and documents from Kanther’s home and offices in late January, as well as from other Hesse state CDU officials implicated in the finance scandal.

Kohl supporters within the CDU are still numerous and have been lobbying the nonpartisan president of parliament, former Social Democrat Wolfgang Thierse, to deal lightly with the legendary statesman despite his refusal to cooperate with investigators by naming the sources of illegal political contributions.

But Thierse slapped the CDU with a whopping $20-million-plus fine Tuesday for submitting falsified documents for state matching funds in 1998--the first of many penalties that could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

In addition to the parliamentary inquiry, Kohl faces a criminal probe launched by prosecutors in the former capital, Bonn, and could be jailed on contempt grounds unless he identifies the donors.

Kohl’s stubborn defiance of the law he was sworn to uphold during 16 years as chancellor and 25 years as head of the CDU has angered Germans more than the financial crimes and misdemeanors of which he stands accused.

“There is a feeling among many here that we put our trust in the wrong people, that we got rid of one form of government that thought it was more powerful than the law only to get another one,” said social psychologist Hans-Joachim Maaz from the eastern city of Halle. “The scandal brings into question what kind of democracy we have gotten for our efforts. The Kohl system looks a lot like the authoritarian regime we had before him.”