Disgraced Party Feels German Voters’ Wrath

In this boggy flatland between the North and Baltic seas, considered the back of beyond by most Germans, voters Sunday rose to the unusual occasion of being political bellwethers to reelect Social Democrats to the state leadership and punish the scandal-plagued Christian Democratic Union.

State election results for tiny Schleswig-Holstein were neither the landslide for incumbent Social Democratic Gov. Heide Simonis nor the humiliating loss for CDU challenger Volker Ruehe that had been predicted, allowing both sides to claim moral victory in the hard-fought contest.

But the vote in this northern state was a telling referendum on public trust in the CDU, the party of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl now in the midst of Germany’s worst political crisis since World War II. Ruehe, who only three months ago had been expected to run away with victory, was forced to admit defeat and retreat to his role as a member of the federal Parliament.

Simonis, a sharp-tongued 56-year-old who has served as the only female governor of a German state since 1993, had been trailing Ruehe by more than 10 percentage points as recently as November, suffering the consequences of high unemployment and such languishing traditional industries as shipbuilding and agriculture.

But week after week of scandalous revelations about Kohl and other CDU leaders taking suspect donations and hiding them in foreign bank accounts so damaged the party’s standing that several polls had predicted Simonis and the Social Democrats would win 50% of the state vote and outright control of Schleswig-Holstein.

Unofficial returns gave the Social Democrats just over 43%, compared with nearly 35% for Ruehe and the CDU. The environmentalist Greens, who share power here as they do in a national coalition, won 6.4% of the vote, providing the Social Democrats with a simple majority once votes for parties that failed to meet a 5% hurdle were redistributed.

A jubilant Simonis assured voters less than an hour after the polls closed that she was eager to continue governing in partnership with the Greens. But she held open the door for potential new alliances with the liberal Free Democrats, who won nearly 8%, and the Danish minority party, which garnered 4% but has the right to proportional representation in the state parliament despite failing to clear the 5% margin.

“We have fulfilled our goal of keeping the leadership,” Simonis told supporters, adding that an even more important result was the turnaround of a string of losses for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s party in 1999. “We have stopped the trend against the Social Democrats seen last year, and this is important for the future.”

Schroeder defeated Kohl in a tough 1998 battle for the federal leadership, but the Social Democrats were battered by seven successive state election setbacks last year.

Schleswig-Holstein, with only 2.7 million residents, is among Germany’s smaller states, but the other election set for this year is in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous and industrialized of this country’s 16 states. Both Social Democrats and the CDU insisted that the Kiel results bode well for their chances during the May elections in North Rhine-Westphalia.

“The CDU is still here, and it is ready for battle,” Ruehe told supporters after the results made clear that he and his party had lost, if more respectably than expected. He repeatedly told journalists that his showing “under these severely difficult circumstances” proved that his party has managed to stabilize itself amid the crisis.

Although he was a member of Kohl’s Cabinet for six years and has long been one of the most senior members of the CDU leadership, Ruehe has so far not been implicated in the allegations of bribe-taking and money-laundering that have devastated voter confidence in the party.

“Clearly we have lost, but we have averted a collapse and stabilized the vote,” Ruehe said of Sunday’s outcome. “The CDU would have won this election if not for the funding scandal.”

Despite having lost the local contest, Ruehe may be better positioned by his relatively respectable finish to challenge the party’s eastern German general secretary, Angela Merkel, for the post of national party leader; a decision on that job will be made next month. The funding scandal forced Kohl’s handpicked successor, Wolfgang Schaeuble, to resign earlier this month amid allegations that he was involved in the shady slush fund operations.

Even Merkel, considered the front-runner to succeed Schaeuble in the party’s top job, praised her rival for pulling off a respectable performance in Schleswig-Holstein.

“Volker Ruehe did a fantastic job. The CDU is coming up from the bottom,” she told journalists in Berlin.

CDU leaders will gather in Berlin on Tuesday to choose a parliamentary leader, a post that has even more political clout than the national leadership. Those negotiations may shed light on how the party plans to climb back from disgrace to fight the leftists who are now governing for control of Germany in the future.