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Germany's Red/Green coalition may implode

By John J. Metzler
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

September 29, 1999

UNITED NATIONS -- Germany's maverick Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer addressed the UN General Assembly presenting his government's worldview on the cusp of the new century. He may not return to the rostrum next year if the Berlin government's bickering Red/Green coalition implodes due to both vexing internal dissent and staggering external State electoral setbacks.

A year after winning nationwide elections, Germany's Social Democratic (SPD) and Green coalition--always a stormy marriage--seems set for the rocks. Though the populist and politically morphing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder led his party out of the woods after sixteen years of governance by the Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats, it seems that winning an election and governing a country are not quite the same thing.

Promoted by a telegenic if roguish arrogance -- and a highly visible fourth wife--Schroeder has alienated most of his own party -- but admittedly for the right reasons. Schroeder now has weathered a string of stunning state election defeats in September. Losses in traditional SPD fiefdoms often have less to do with the opposition party appeal than the fact that SPD party loyalists are clearly not loyal to Schroeder.

Defeats in Saarland and North Rhine Westphalia in the west, and Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony in the east, illustrate a nationwide dilemma for the ruling coalition.

State election debacles are more shocking if one looks at traditional voting patterns; the loss in Saar or in Saxony where the governing party gained 11 percent of the vote on the state level would be highly unlikely in the US. Think of a Republican landslide West Virginia or the Democrats getting a paltry eleven percent of the vote in a statewide race in Ohio, and you begin to see the pattern.

That Schroeder wants to play a Tony Blair role is unquestioned -- the difference was that Blair purged his Labour Party of the loony left and labor union hard-liners before setting out on his economic reform path. Schroeder is fighting and pulling his SPD every bit along the way to sell austerity and long overdue fiscal responsibility.

The political libretto seems the same -- a former leftist gone moderate -- to the point of wearing Brioni suits, smoking Cuban cigars but leaving his former hard left politics in the ashtray, and appealing to a "new middle" of business and labor.

As the Economist opines of Chancellor Schroeder "leading his demoralized forces from one regional voting disaster to another; a one time Marxist and environmentalist turned fan of the Vienna Opera and "pragmatic" pal of industry bosses; a careerist who long yearned for the top job...but had no idea of what to do when his wish was granted."

The problem for Germany's Red/Green coalition is that the SPD rank and file remains heavily entrenched in their ways, most of the ecologist fringe Greens have not grown up, and the economy still is pulled by the deadweight of debt and massive social programs.

Finance Minister Hans Eichel conceded that a quarter of the tax revenue finances national debt; nearly half of the national wealth goes to public spending, and economic growth -- hampered by high taxes and a burden of social benefits -- is anemic. Nine years after reunification, the bills keeps coming in from the former communist East while the economic landscape is yet to fully bloom.

According to London's Financial Times, "The government is being punished because of the resentment of the consequences of reunification. The official unemployment rate is 19 percent and considerably higher if job-creation schemes are factored out. That is double the rate in the West. Schroeder's budget austerity may look reasonable in western Germany, but it looks insulting in the east."

The vote in Saxony underscored another problem too -- while the SPD took a drubbing at 11 percent of the vote, the former communist party -- quaintly recast as the Party of Democratic Socialism gained 22 percent! The hugely popular and competent Christian Democrat Kurt Biedenkopf -- King Kurt of Saxony -- won a whopping 57 percent of the ballot and a third term as state Premier.

Sadly a dangerous undertow of political polarization plagues former eastern Germany where nearly a decade after the communist wall fell in Berlin, there's still a psychological barrier between West and East. As significantly, the ruling Social Democrats seem anchored in the "isms" of the past and not very able, or willing, to set sail for clearer waters.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

September 29, 1999


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