Schroeder Hangs On in Germany

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder hung on to the German leadership by the slimmest of margins in a cliffhanger election Sunday, after rising in voters’ esteem at the campaign’s eleventh hour for his steadfast refusal to commit German troops to a war against Iraq.

Overcoming his failure to reform the shackled economy or put more people back to work, Schroeder weathered accusations of anti-Americanism as he tapped into Germans’ wellspring of resentment about U.S. bullying and Washington’s desire to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The photo finish between Schroeder’s Social Democrats and their conservative opponents, led by the Christian Social Union’s Edmund Stoiber, reflected the deep divisions in German society over both domestic and foreign policy. The Bavarian governor had accused the incumbent chancellor of damaging cherished ties with U.S. allies and instilling fear among Germans.

In the closest election result in modern German history, the conservatives gained ground on the incumbents by making the 10% jobless rate and a stagnant economy the main issues, while Schroeder pulled up in the last leg by promoting a more independent and self-assured foreign policy for this NATO member nation.

Complete official results today showed that Schroeder’s party and his allies in the Greens environmentalist movement won a combined 47.1% of the vote to continue their coalition for another four years. The opposition Christian Democratic Union in alliance with the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union and the pro-business Free Democrats had a total of 45.9%.

Before the complete results were announced, a beaming Schroeder waited until well after midnight to appear before supporters in what served as a turn in the winner’s circle. But mindful of the U.S. postelection fiasco two years ago, he refrained from declaring a categorical victory. He was accompanied by Greens Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, hoarse from weeks of frantic campaigning.

“A majority is a majority, and if we have it, we will use it,” Schroeder said, alluding to the narrowness of his coalition’s lead. The Social Democrats and Stoiber’s CDU-CSU alliance polled about 38.5% each, with the Greens’ 8.6% giving the incumbents the edge over the conservatives and the Free Democrats, who polled a disappointing 7.4%.

Stoiber, who had leaped on exit poll projections to proclaim his party the winner, conceded at 1 a.m. that his opponents appeared to have clung to a majority. But he predicted that the government would be in crisis “inside of a year” and claimed a “strategic victory” for his side in erasing the nearly 6-percentage-point lag his party suffered behind the Social Democrats in 1998.

Under Germany’s complicated election system, voters choose parties rather than an individual chancellor candidate, leaving the appointment of a government leader up to a majority coalition. Though neither pair of allied parties posted an outright majority, the failure of the former Communists to clear a 5% threshold to take a share of the proportional vote meant that the seats would be redistributed to give the incumbent coalition an estimated 306 to the opposition’s 295. The ex-Communists, the Party of Democratic Socialism, won only two directly elected seats in what will be a 603-member Parliament.

In a postelection talk show, Stoiber accused his opponent of playing “the politics of fear” by labeling U.S. policy toward Iraq military adventurism. He reiterated campaign claims that Schroeder had damaged relations with U.S. allies with his electioneering. But voters tended to see the chancellor’s position as defending them against American bullying.

“Schroeder caught the feelings of Germans opposed to war,” said Alexander Marczewski, a political science student from Konstanz, near the border with Switzerland. “The opposition to Iraq is not about anti-Americanism. The U.S. has to accept that we are our own country. It must accept the fact that other countries can disagree with it but still be its partner.”

Ellen Steiner, a Social Democrat for decades, put it this way: “Yes, the economy is bad. Yes, people are angry. But Stoiber can’t fix it. The Social Democrats can. Iraq was a huge issue.... Germans don’t want to be dragged into any more wars. [President] Bush wants war too quickly for us. I think he wants one to fix his own economy.”

Outside party headquarters, hundreds of Social Democrats huddled under umbrellas as a steady rain fell on crowds gathered around outdoor TV screens. Party workers inside leaned over glass railings and tried to stay confident as predictions showed Schroeder and the Social Democrats creeping toward victory.

The clear winners of the evening were the Greens, whose push for greater environmental protection gained credence this summer when devastating floods swept along the 700-mile length of the Elbe River, inflicting at least $15 billion in damage. The weeks of deluge wiped out much of the post-reunification improvements in eastern Germany, hitting the baroque monuments of Dresden so hard that many likened the destruction to the city’s flattening under World War II Allied bombing. The Greens’ 8.6% of the vote was nearly 2 percentage points higher than their 1998 showing.

Stoiber’s hopes for gaining the leadership in coalition with the liberal Free Democrats collapsed with the smaller party’s disappointing results. Party Vice Chairman Juergen Moellemann had reignited a strident debate over Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the last few days of campaigning, provoking accusations from Jewish leaders of anti-Semitism.

Free Democratic leader Guido Westerwelle proclaimed the results “a great disappointment” and lashed out at Moellemann for having damaged the party’s standing. The party leadership demanded that Moellemann resign.

Schroeder’s team also suffered a campaign casualty, with Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin announcing that she would leave the Cabinet if the government won reelection to spare it further damage from a remark she made comparing Bush’s Iraq policy to diversionary tactics used by Adolf Hitler.

The Social Democratic stalwart insisted that she had been misquoted, but party and government colleagues condemned her comments as outrageous.

“As a German, I don’t like to see the crimes of Hitler trivialized by such a comparison,” Social Democratic lawmaker Volkmar Schultz said of the justice minister’s faux pas.

Stoiber sought to cast the remark, made among a small group of trade union officials in Daeubler-Gmelin’s rural constituency, as evidence of Schroeder’s poor relations with the Bush administration.

But voters seemed to discount the troubled relationship as the cause of the Social Democrats’ reduced share of the vote. Some attributed the drop in support since the last election to public disenchantment with the leadership’s handling of domestic affairs.

The Christian Democrats, who ruled for 16 years before Schroeder defeated Helmut Kohl in 1998 elections, blamed the incumbent for failing to loosen the chains on German employers so that more jobs could be created and the economy given a boost by less regulation. Schroeder made little dent in the more than 4 million unemployed in Germany, and economic growth has been flat for the last two years.

But the campaign was dominated in the last days by an emotional clash between Berlin and Washington over Schroeder’s reluctance to back any U.S. attack on Iraq and by Daeubler-Gmelin’s widely publicized Hitler remark.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called the justice minister’s statement “outrageous and inexplicable.”

Much of the recent strife was driven by the election campaign, said Jackson Janes, head of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, who was on hand for the election. “But my sense is that there’s going to be more of this before there is less of it. It’s going to be a while before things settle down.”

Conservative voters were still grousing about the anti-American theme of recent days even after it became clear that they had failed to force a leadership change.

“Schroeder has used Iraq for political reasons. He’s played on fear, and he did it very skillfully,” said Jana Rosenmann, an aerospace worker from Munich who was watching the results come in at the conservatives’ headquarters while sipping wine. “I was hoping Stoiber would have hit Schroeder harder about damaging 50 years’ worth of American-German relations.”

Halfway through his beer and deep into his opinion on the election, Gerhard Handke, managing director of the Federation of German Wholesale and Foreign Trade, said he worried that Schroeder’s position on Iraq might have severe economic consequences. “The U.S. is a very important trading partner. Why kick them?” Handke said.