German Party Gives Itself More Rope

Germany’s opposition Christian Democratic Union has embroiled itself in so many self-destructive scandals lately that political analysts wondered aloud Thursday if the party of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl has a secret death wish.

On a day when Kohl was again being interrogated about slush funds and alleged kickbacks, even some prominent CDU members were distancing themselves from the conservative party’s new leaders for exposing them to public scorn and media lambasting.

In the latest instance of self-inflicted political wounds, the party was forced to cancel a campaign blitz attacking the government’s pension reform program only 24 hours after launching it in a blaze of publicity. The posters and billboards that drew fire showed Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in ersatz police mug shots with captions suggesting he had been charged with pension fraud.

The fiasco came only a few days after the CDU tried but failed to force two popular government officials from office by airing exaggerated accounts of their radical pasts.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, both members of the environmentalist Greens party that shares power with Schroeder’s Social Democrats, have long owned up to having been active in the anti-establishment scene of the 1970s. But the Cabinet members have rejected as “absurd” allegations by CDU leaders that they supported terrorist crimes of that era.

The CDU’s popularity has plummeted since Kohl admitted in November 1999 that he had accepted about $1 million in secret and therefore illegal campaign donations--and then refused to name the donors. His successor as party leader, Wolfgang Schaeuble, was forced to resign soon after when it became clear that he also knew about the illegal funds.

The donations scandal was in the limelight again Thursday as Kohl and his former foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the liberal Free Democratic Party, were called to testify before an investigative parliamentary commission.

Combative as ever, Kohl accused the commission members of trying to destroy his legacy as the chancellor who oversaw Germany’s 1990 reunification.

Current CDU chairwoman Angela Merkel took up the party leadership less than a year ago and has already weathered a hurricane of bad publicity, most brought on by ill-considered comments by party colleagues. The CDU lost two state elections last year because of divisive posturing on immigration issues that alienated many Germans.

Laurenz Meyer is the party’s newly appointed secretary-general, the third in less than a year, and is the man behind some of the biggest backfires in attempts to take votes from the Social Democrats. Late last year, he sparked heated debate by proclaiming that Germans should feel free to exhibit nationalist pride and that immigrants should be compelled to adopt the German language and culture.

Meyer was also the architect of the mug shot posters, unveiled as the centerpiece of the party’s campaign against Schroeder’s pension reform in the run-up to March 25 elections in two states. Ironically, the pension program, which the Social Democrats expect will be in operation by April, bears much resemblance to one Kohl pushed unsuccessfully for years.

“In what moral state must a party be if it is unscrupulous enough to depict a political opponent as a criminal?” asked the Berlin daily Tageszeitung. “In what intellectual state must a party be if it is stupid enough to discredit its own campaign against the past activities of others?”

The spree of political disasters has drawn fire even from conservative media usually supportive of the CDU.

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said of the mug shot posters, “The idea was not just tasteless, it was also stupid.”