Germany Goes Amerikanisch
Caldwell, Christopher
G DISCO, D I V 0 IMMIG INFLATIOH, WELFARE DEPENDEHCY, AND NEW CHANCELLOR GERHARD SCHRODER. 38 SCH ae way Helmut lection posters were defaced towards the end of his campa~ was a...
...The old "two-and-a-half party system"—in which small parties held the balance of power between the two stable monoliths of the SPD and CDU —has collapsed, and been replaced by a five-party constellation that includes market capitalists, enviros, and disgruntled East Germans...
...A year ago, he told a journalist: "To whoever abuses our Guest Laws, I have only one thing to say: Raus, and schnell...
...a recent CSU report asked...
...Francois Mitterrand was a good friend of mine...
...Schroder's widowed mother made ends meet by scrubbing barrack toilets for the British occupying forces...
...And there was less evidence of Schroder's reform credentials than met the eye...
...DOWN EAST On September 27, Kohl lost the chancellorship to Gerhard Schroder, a playboy governor from Lower Saxony...
...Every single major city in the former East Germany has lost population since reunification, but Schwerin has lost a quarter of its 135,000 residents, and there's 15 percent unemployment among those who've stayed...
...Berlin presence, was a former Stasi informant...
...In Russia, such a "transition" spawned not only an oligarchy of criminal bankers but also an armed post-Communist role for the KGB operatives who now serve as their "guards...
...Stollman, one of Germany's rare information-age multimillionaires, who founded CompuNet at age 29, spent the campaign convincing German voters that Schroder would be business-friendly...
...Those who had been saving for crummy Trabants bought Volkswagens...
...The two soon ditched their respective families, and launched a marriage that would be the stuff of German gossip columns for a decade and a half...
...But with a huge shift in power...
...As in almost every other campaign speech, Kohl took a valedictory tone...
...The final sticking point before the Greens voted to enter the coalition was over whether the fact that two of the party's three ministers are male violated the party's 5o percent gender quota...
...But even after a strong showing in one state election last summer, its national support is paltry...
...Privately, the party worried that the three or four million new voters who would be added by a citizenship reform would vote left...
...The Greens succeeded in getting a few of their goals, none as radical as it at first sounds: decriminalization of soft drugs (which was effectively already in place), normalization of gay cohabitation (ditto), and a commitment to phase out nuclear power (which is no longer a particular bargain in an era of natural gas and cheap oil...
...Schroder, Kohl said, would form an alliance with the ex-Communists—the "red-lacquered fascists," as he called them...
...The Berlin stronghold of the PDS, Prenzlauer Berg, is turning into the most elegantly restored rowhouse neighborhood in the city, and Kathe Kollwitz Platz has some of Berlin's most expensive bars and cafés...
...At bus stops, stations, on billboards in traftic islands, Kohl squi at passersby over an extended index finger...
...We hear a lot of languages now in Berlin...
...In Cottbus, on the Polish border, it's 40 percent...
...When Gerd moved out, Hiltrud didn't take it well...
...The candidate always took the stage to the "SchrOderhymne," a tangle of flourishing strings and pounding synthesizers that sounded like a dance mix of "0 Canada" as it might have been recorded in the disco era...
...Yet Kohl was not just a bumbler who happened to be in office when the Wall came down...
...But it was as good an example as any of why so many middle-of-the-road Germans had shifted their votes to an SPD candidate they didn't quite trust...
...Rostock, Mecklenburg's largest city, has become a haven for rightists, and a late-September demonstration by the new German People's Union (DVU) led to the biggest police deployment in the region's history...
...This last was ditched when press reports detailed the jet-setting profligacy of top Greens' own vacation arrangements...
...Whether such rhetoric stemmed from conviction or a flair for plagiarism was unclear...
...A federal plan to turn Schwerin into a haven for cultural tourists— $ 35 million to restore the castle, $200-a-ticket subsidies for the elegant State Theater, a fleet of tour boats that ply the romantic Baltic bays nearly passengerless— has flopped...
...Think of it...
...Kohl avoided a Russian-style pseudo-transition that could have poisoned Germany for a generation...
...It was folly to hire an East German when a comparable Czech or Polish worker could be hired for a fraction of the cost...
...He promised "blooming landscapes in three or four years...
...If we think of Germany as looking like America would have if the Reagan revolution had never happened, the two parties are going to look more like Democrats and Republicans of yore...
...So Germans were looking to an "energetic young reformer" with fresh ideas to move Germany out from under the shadow of its post-World War II division, into a new era...
...But he was also president of the Young Socialists (Jusos), at a time when the brightest young leftists were drawn to the fledgling Green Party...
...The old SPD was a trade-union party, the old CDU a church party...
...This is the first step to the normalization of the PDS...
...Schroder's was not in itself an outré view on the German left...
...What gave Schroder the reputation for not being a run-of-themill socialist was less his politics than his style...
...German money for German jobs...
...What was that "Gerhard Schroder and me" all about...
...As a self-described Marxist and "human rights lawyer," he rose to public attention defending Horst Mahler, an associate of the Red Army faction, for his role in a series of bombings in 1978...
...Once a coastal highway was built, he said, Rostock and Schwerin might be considered for an Airbus plant...
...Stollman resigned...
...04...
...Schrader's gift was for splitting the difference between the warring parties, and then assuming leadership by casting deciding votes...
...What's more, the 16 million East Germans were brought under the umbrella of the pay-as-you-go German welfare state without ever having contributed a penny...
...The East had become Germany's Sicily, its Yorkshire, its Bronx—difficult for the people living there and a headache for the whole country...
...It was a solid defeat in the old West Germany...
...As soon as the rough parameters of the SPD plan were known, IG Metall, the country's largest union, demanded a 6. 5 percent wage increase, and said they'd walk away from Alliance for Jobs talks unless their demands were met...
...Thirty percent of Frankfurt is foreign-born, as are 30 percent of the schoolchildren in Cologne...
...These problems were supposed to have been taken care of by the time Germany moved its capital from Bonn to Berlin in 1999...
...Schroder was resolutely anti-American...
...Unemployment is at 19 percent across the old East...
...ONE NATION TWO PARTIES At first glance, even with the Communists defanged, it looks like a period of instability in Germany...
...Instead, East Germany was lagging behind its neighbors, and the business pages were full of articles about "learning from Poland...
...And Brandenburg's governor Manfred Stolpe is widely assumed to have been a Stasi bigwig...
...The East was supposed to be a stabilizing force in Central Europe, a chic, tranquil, and non-threatening link to lesser countries seeking to join the European Union...
...the Jusos were, by and large, earnest blockheads seeking to "maintain their political viability in the system...
...Schroder has had four wives, with no children from any of them...
...It's hard to believe the changes...
...The East was supposed to be a stabilizing force in Central Europe, a chic, tranquil, and non-threatening link to lesser countries seeking to join the European Union somewhere down the line: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic...
...Instead of the one-to-one currency conversion that destroyed the East German economy Kohl should have set up a five- or ten-year phase-in that would have allowed easterners gradually to find a place in the new Germany...
...There are now 7 million foreigners living in Germany, almost a tenth of the population, including the North Africans and Turks brought over on Germany's Guest-Worker program since the early 1 960's...
...This was the first Germans had heard that they'd elected Lafontaine to run the country...
...By East German standards it had been prosperous, as a depot for nearby grain farms and home to dozens of small state industries that made cable, raw plastic, rope, and tool-and-die for the mid-century economy that still existed in the Eastern Bloc twenty years ago...
...First, Schroder cut the legs out from under Jost Stollman, the 43-year-old nonpartisan entrepreneur who had agreed last summer to serve as SchrOder's economics minister...
...His campaign rallies broke new ground...
...The "New Middle" business had been a bait-and-switch all along...
...But we heard enough Russian...
...The key change on the left may be not the Greens' rise to power but the ex-Communist PDS's rise to respectability...
...In the last week of the race, Stollman alarmed the SPD by describing Germany's welfare state as a "prison for the average wage-earner," and calling for a "throroughgoing change in mentality...
...It was suddenly so quiet you could hear the water lapping on the beach across the street...
...Hiltrud decided that she wanted to be a national political star herself...
...The PDS now appears, for all its electoral representation, to be about as threatening as the French Communist Party—a coalition of the young and chic with the old and irrelevant, espousing foolish programs but powerless to enact them, and not in any important sense "Communist...
...It wasn't his first visit...
...His daytime speeches were followed by afternoon-long blues concerts, and his nighttime ones were like rock festivals: leather vests and dirty jeans for the guys, nose rings and crew cuts for the girls...
...But no sooner had the votes been cast than Schroder transferred control of European affairs and economic forecasting from Stollman's ministry to Lafontaine's...
...The German political classes may not have chosen this strategy consciously, and they may bitch and moan about its cultural impact, but mass immigration was—and remains—the only way to pay for an unreformed Ponzi-scheme welfare state...
...Mahler was convicted...
...The first was a high-school sweetheart who supported him through his legal studies at Gottingen...
...When Schaible appeared along with Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen at a beerhallcum-art-gallery in Prenzlauer Berg, the mayor said: "I used to drive down empty streets here and every fifty or sixty meters there would be a man with a weapon on his back...
...So Kohl began by urging patience and talking about infrastructure...
...Lafontaine is considered, within and without the party, a man of great intellectual force...
...They wept and sang...
...Schroder was no stranger to such rhetoric himself...
...Well, without yesterday, there wouldn't be any today...
...He is handsome in a squat, overfed way, and cultivates a reputation for the proletarian hedonism and passionate Gernadichkeit that passes for being a regular guy in Germany...
...It calls for a gradual lowering of income taxes across the board until they reach roughly the pre-1990 levels, with a bottom rate of zo percent and a top rate of just under 5o percent...
...No economic ones, only political ones, such as the still-undefined "alliance for jobs and training...
...he's three years older than Kohl was when he came to power...
...Her worries were almost comically extensive: hunting bans, the ozone hole, Save the Whales, Save the Herons, Save the Crows, Save the Bats...
...This is our country, too...
...Schrader quit school at 4 and became a salesman for four years, before enrolling in Gottingen's left-wing law school...
...The bill was not evenly distributed...
...As early as 1983, he told Yuri Andropov on a state visit that Germany aimed ultimately for unity...
...But then it takes all the money back in gas taxes and alternative minimum taxes and closing of loopholes (many of them involving investment in the East) for big companies...
...These include a pull-out from NATO, a tripling of gas taxes, and a rationing of vacation travel to one flight every five years...
...The other neighborhoods, the grisly world of the Platthauser, or high-rise tenements, are populated by déclassé ex-East German apparatchiks more interested in advancing claims to welfare payments within the system than in advancing Communism from without...
...Whether or not that is the whole story, one thing is clear: Kohl completed the last step in a process, begun 53 years ago, of ridding Germany of the legacy of Nazism...
...Schmidt who sacrificed his career to defend it from Russia...
...The new chancellor can do nothing without Oskar Lafontaine, who controls the Social Democrats and favors a welfare state even larger than today's...
...But the thousand or so people milling around sullenly had heard similar promises in 1 990 and 1994...
...But one of his very first acts as a deputy in 1980— between praising tenement-squatters, defending draft-dodgers, undermining chancellor Helmut Schmidt's support of the neutron bomb and the Pershing missile deployments, and pulling the stunt of being the first deputy ever to appear before the Bundestag without a tie—had been to call for the release of Hitler's aged henchman Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison...
...Schroder opposed, a large Holocaust memorial planned for central Berlin...
...Had Germany's foreigners been voters, Kohl would have lost his last two elections...
...The CDU used a string of such pronouncements from Schroder's early career to convey that the SPD candidate was hardly "world class...
...Most Germans blamed Kohl for messing up the whole enterprise, for foolishly deciding in 1 99o, at the outset of unification, to exchange West Germany's hard Deutschemarks for East Germany's monopoly-money Ostmarks at one-to-one...
...When he ran against Kohl for the chancellor's post in 199o, he suffered one of the most crushing defeats in German electoral history...
...In a country where the National Historical Museum has placards warning parents about the explicit nature of its exhibits, and the U.S...
...He smokes cigars and drinks a lot— enough so that he considered it advisable to go on the wagon for the latter part of his campaign...
...December r998 " The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...What is probably happening is the first steps of an evolution into a more U.S.-style politics...
...Schroder has made Lafontaine finance minister and given him unprecedented power...
...Embassy keeps a list of dangerous-to-go places for its non-white employees, the hard right is not to be ignored...
...There should have been a more gradual transition, the argument goes, along the lines of that followed in Poland under finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz...
...These were words he would come to regret...
...Now, instead of just sitting in on cabinet meetings, she began to call them, dominate them, and occasionally dismiss them...
...I'll grant you, he's been to Cuba a lot...
...It's a solution to the problem you get when your welfare state is so generous that you can't pay for it without raising taxes, and when your pampered citizens will tolerate neither tax hikes nor service cuts...
...But Kohl had to do it...
...But there were troubling signs...
...in the east, where the CDU had sparked such gratitude and dominated politics as recently as 1994, they won barely a quarter of the vote...
...December r998 • The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...Schwerin is lucky...
...Undermining the old economy was the only way to undermine East Germany's elite, an un-denazified Stalinist dictatorship that possessed, in the Stasi, the most extensive secret police system that has existed anytime, anywhere...
...They made guest appearances on sit-corns and invited networks and newspapers into their farmhouse to write about the "political dream couple...
...In other words, it increases tax burdens on the sectors of the economy that create all the jobs...
...His aides maintain that that was what he meant to do all along...
...The old commonplace that the CDU enjoys a The American Spectator • December 199 8 natural majority in Germany appears no longer to hold...
...Schrader never met his father, who was killed fighting for Hitler in Romania three days after he was born...
...How about East Germany, the "Chief Thing" of SchrOder's campaign promises...
...OSKAR WINNER As the deciding votes came in on election night, the SPD party leader Oskar Lafontaine appeared before a roomful of assembled loyalists and thanked them "for your trust in Gerhard Schroder and me...
...In a country where leftism is largely the province of intellectuals, Schroder wore his lack of education on his sleeve, bragging that he had never read any books except for James Clavell's Shogun and a few textbooks...
...It may be the chief thing, but there are thirteen or fourteen things to take care of first...
...Germany is not Britain, where Tony Blair had to reform his Labour party before he took power...
...The East had got rid of its command economy, but it experienced capitalism as a command economy...
...z . The American Spectator • December 1998 This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...The East had become Germany's Sicily, itsYorkshire, its Bronx—hard for those living there and a headache for the whole country...
...In Schwerin, the state elections wound up just as Kohl had warned...
...With all fiscal calculations complicated by the globalization of the economy and the impending surrender of German monetary policy to the European Union, the problems looked insoluble...
...As these milieux lose their drawing power, the parties will realign into a new two-bloc system that is more ideological and less social...
...On a platform in Leipzig, he announced that his crime policy was "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"— Blair's formulation, word-for-word...
...It is a step for which he is now both ridiculed and loathed in his own country, and for which he has paid with his political career...
...The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to East Germany's Communist party, controls a third of the seats in the regional parliament...
...Petra Pau, adviser to East Germany's last leader Egon Krenz, was something worse than that...
...Kohl urged "throwing out" "foreign criminals"—many of them Germanborn monoglots who had never even seen their "native countries...
...Germans seem to sense this when they look at SchrOder's disco rallies, his wispy policy soundbites, his womanizing...
...Germany's "Blood and Soil" citizenship laws date from 1913 — if you're of Turkish descent, you're covered under "guest laws," not citizenship laws, even if you and your parents were born in Germany...
...In deciding on the one-to-one mark exchange, Kohl launched a new East German economy but destroyed the old Communist one, even such parts of it as were still "functional...
...So she began sitting in on cabinet meetings and accompanying "Gerd" onto talk shows...
...The SPD/Green immigration reform put forward in the month after Schroder's election called for immigrants to be allowed to apply for citizenship after eight years' residence, and established a limited right of dual citizenship for all born in Germany of German residents...
...While Schroder's Social Democrats (SPD) and their Green coalition partners were able to cobble together only a 21seat majority, the CDU's 35.9 percent was its worst showing since 1949...
...In a country where leftism is largely the province of intellectuals, Schroder wore his lack of education on his sleeve, bragging that he had never read any books except for James Clavell's Shogun and a few textbooks...
...Brandt who linked it to itself...
...Before the election, experts agreed that a strong PDS showing would doom a red-green coalition by sucking votes away from the bigger left parties...
...Gregor Gysi, the Trabant-driving, bon mot—publishing lawyer who is the party's most colorful December 1998 • The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...The Jusos were riven between a "Young Generation" faction that backed Helmut Schmidt's pro-NATO policies, and a Stalinist wing...
...You know, I was talking to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991," he said...
...There's a hypocrisy to treating immigration as a problem, of course, since for decades it has been a solution for Germany...
...There were a handful of punky-looking right-wing teenagers banging farm implements on the museum steps across the street, and dozens of PDS youths blowing whistles at everything Kohl said...
...The CDU has paid no attention to this demographic shift, other than to engage in sterile debate over whether or not Germany is "an immigrant country," whatever that means...
...There were Galeries Lafayette and Jaguar dealerships in East Berlin, and McDonald's and "I-Can't-Believe-It's-Yogurt" in every quaint market square and train station in the old East Germany...
...The SPD will be in as commanding a role as American Democrats in the 1960's and 7o's, forming semi-permanent alliances with the Greens (which will serve as the coalition's limousine-liberal wing) and, eventually, the PDS (its inner-city underclass wing...
...Everyone clapped politely...
...One of these realities was immigration...
...The Germans had looked to the "social market" system as their bulwark against not just want but also political instability for half a century, and now it looked like reunification was going to capsize it—at the very moment Germany needed stability most...
...Republic...
...Meanwhile, the budget sent a signal that unleashed radicalism from all quarters...
...While he sang the praises of Lower Saxony's powerful business interests, most prominently Volkswagen, she argued stridently for animal rights and vegetarianism—often clashing with her husband in public forums...
...TAX DODGING By mid-September the "Young Union" had become a fixture at Schroder rallies...
...Kohl said, sadly...
...CHRISTOPHERCALDWELL,a former TAS senior editor, is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...
...Blooming landscapes" and all that...
...The Realo Joschka Fischer, the new Green foreign minister and deputy chancellor, managed to climb down from the most radical Sponti suggestions of the campaign...
...Keeping the factories open would have meant keeping the Stasi-linked brass in positions of political and economic "leadership," giving them a launching pad for political chicanery...
...Now people weren't trying to whistle him off the stage, but they weren't cheering either...
...At 54, Schroder is not particularly young...
...Most blamed Kohl for messing up the whole enterprise...
...In retrospect, it was unthinkable that such a massive gap in intelligence and intraparty clout as exists between Lafontaine and Schroder could have been dealt with, except through some power sharing...
...The new government's first moves exposed the falsehood—fostered by all foreign news stories on the campaign —that there's some kind of opposition between the "ossified socialist' Lafontaine and the "reformer" Schroder...
...and Kohl who sacrificed his career to wring totalitarianism out of its last German stronghold—who ran Germany well that we might worry less about Schroder running it poorly...
...Without his party Schroder can do nothing, and it is Lafontaine—not Schroder—who controls the SPD...
...So far, so good...
...In other words, he has accepted the verdict of 1 990 that he's unelectable—but wants to rule nonetheless...
...If the blooming landscapes Kohl promised had arrived, it was in a superficial way...
...Right now, I see many more possibilities for negotiations with the USSR than with the USA," he said during Leonid Brezhnev's 1981 visit to Bonn...
...In fact, Germany now has such a coalition with a 36-seat PDS presence...
...and it's not the U.S., where Bill Clinton can work with Republican majorities against his own party...
...And the room burst into cheers...
...Anti-immigration rhetoric was tempting politics...
...Schroder then pursed his lips and asked his listeners to join him in a new spirit of altruism: "Ask not what your country can do for you," he sighed, as if the thought had just occurred to him, "but what you can do for your country...
...New highways and industrial parks were paid for by overburdened West German taxpayers, who demanded not just conformism but gratitude.The East now experienced capitalism as a command economy...
...People were ripping mad at Kohl...
...Yes, there were new highways and industrial parks, all of them paid for by increasingly overburdened West German taxpayers...
...Many "Communist" neighborhoods look like this— radical as Ann Arbor is radical, not as the Baader-Meinhof Gang was...
...Schroder not only made Lafontaine finance minister...
...Enterprises that had been merely backward when the Wall fell were instantly rendered worthless...
...ran the DVU's...
...He decided to become a lawyer, he says, while watching dubbed episodes of Perry Mason...
...There was one of these posters in the formerly East German town of Schwerin when Kohl came to visit on an overcast day in September...
...Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, is tucked beneath a nineteenth-century castle on a Baltic inlet halfway between Hamburg and Poland...
...38 SCH ae way Helmut lection posters were defaced towards the end of his campa~ was a sign that time was running out on him...
...He decided to become a lawyer, he says, while watching dubbed episodes of Perry Mason...
...Now these spoiled Westerners were demanding not just conformism but gratitude...
...At a time when Bill Clinton's travails with Monica Lewinsky were driving Germany's own elections off the front pages, German commentators tended to sum up Schroder's appeal in the word amerikanisch...
...It was the modified capitalism of the old West German "social market" that had been exported east, lock, stock and barrel...
...Their tax reform plan raises the burdens on the job-producing sectors of the economy...
...On the podium he blushes and gasps and sputters and lisps...
...The Schwerin to which Kohl returned in September was lined with election posters not of the major parties but of the extremist ones...
...Nor was he untouched by World War II...
...What steps will be taken to reduce unemployment...
...It is conventional wisdom that he pursued the wrong policies in the East...
...But they had...
...It had looked The American Spectator • December 1 9 9 8 like a gift, but it wound up sucking every last pfennig of accumulated capital out of the east...
...After ten years of preoccupation with the East, a government was at last addressing the country as it actually existed...
...Gone were the oompah bands and the beer and the bratwurst of tradition...
...Given that the German minister with the European portfolio will have the most powerful political voice on European Community exchange rates, this is an epochal development...
...Those who had been toiling in television factories found their neighbors' houses filling up with Sonys...
...I think it has excellent chances," chimed in the CDU's top local candidate, who was standing beside him...
...The tax reform hammered out by the SPD and their Green partners is all his...
...When some CDU politicians proposed reforms last year, interior minister Manfred Kanther of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's Bavarian sister party, blocked them...
...His bravura exhibition of gall came when he backed both a delegation of international leftists who had come to attack the SPD government for "human rights violations" (essentially on the grounds that it prosecuted terrorists) and the government itself...
...This system of broad deals hammered out by industry, labor, and government supported the most generous benefits system in the world, which offered seven weeks' vacation, 35hour work-weeks, free health care, and a salary-and-benefits package hovering, in certain trades, around $40 an hour...
...Under Germany's Bismarckian pensionand-welfare system, the whole of the social system is paid for by part of the population—with the self-employed and government employees exempt...
...He now takes his place as the fourth among the towering chancellors —Adenauer who linked the country to Europe...
...By the time Schroder met his current wife, Doris Kopf, a petite (88-pound), blonde divorcée who worked for the German tabloid Bild (a sort of cross between the National Enquirer and London's Sun) he was long past the point where he could argue that his personal life was nobody's business...
...Foreigners" have a right to collect retirement benefits, but since they only began arriving in the 1960's, most are too young to...
...Publicly, the CSU cited fears of crime and cultural change...
...It may not have been perfect...
...Only the Green Party has a record of addressing the issue openly...
...Helmut Kohl was being humored by the very people he had helped free...
...During the campaign, Kohl backed, and This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...ran the PDS's...
...The SPD will "ensure that the Euro is a success...
...Shortly before he entered the Bundestag in 1979, he met Hiltrud Hampel, the wife of a local policeman, on a Juso bike trip...
...She then negotiated a tough divorce settlement that Schroder is still paying...
...The Greens, meanwhile, part of the government for the first time, have long been split between "Realo" (or pragmatist) and "Sponti" (or eco-utopian) wings...
...This was a touching point, particularly in the old East Germany...
...But as a Saarlander who favors a welfare state of even larger dimensions than today's, and a NATO skeptic who sought to block German unity, he is someone the German public decidedly does not trust...
...Instead, East Germany lagged behind its neighbors, and the business pages were full of articles about "learning from Poland...
...And what will happen with the European currency...
...And once it became a possibility, he won the consent of France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and spent a trillion marks to achieve it...
...SWINGING AWAY Sort of...
...Standing amid the nose rings and disco music December 1998 • The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...But he could still get the crowd's attention...
...When I met Erich Honecker...
...he gave him unprecedented power to run the economy...
...It means that Germany not only is set to defend its welfare state to the bitter end, but also that, after years of having a currency synonomous with fiscal discipline, Germany has declared itself a currency-softening force on the European political landscape...
...This made Kohl the first chancellor defeated in an election since the Weimar December 1998 The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...In 19% there were still Russian soldiers here...
...With his constant talk of seeking out "the new middle" of Germany's information-age society, of forging an "alliance for jobs," of "training for the service economy," Schroder invited comparisons with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair...
...Schroder appointed her to head a fund for the Children of Chernobyl...
...So you have to import whole classes of people who have a more manageable worker-to-beneficiary ratio...
...She arranged a series of television interviews to reveal that Schroder had padded his expense accounts to buy her clothes, horses, and ponies...
...In the months following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kohl had spoken in every major city in the East, drawing tens of thousands of candle-carrying, cheering countrymen celebrating their new freedom...
...His second supported him through his barely remunerated years as president of the Jusos...
...Said defense minister Volker Ruhe: "Schroder hasn't been to the United States in 18 years...
...He visited Moscow, and developed a bizarre spin on his own country's Nazi past...
...Do the Greens, in all seriousness, want an Islamic Republic of Germany...
...On the government books, they're a windfall...
...I know some people have called me the 'chancellor of yesterday.' Well...
...In 1990, Schroder was elected minister-president (the equivalent of governor) of the state of Lower Saxony...
...But once Mecklenburg's clunky workshops came into competition with the most advanced machine-tool economy in the world, and once its wheat farms had to bid against a dozen European Union countries with today's agricultural methods, there was almost literally nothing left to do in Schwerin...
...The and a hectorfor Germany"--made the message Democratic Union (CDU) party had not only m~e countrycap.nee 1982;they also in Cologne, in Berlin, the posters by sticking a ball of chewed bubblegum on the verytip of Kohl's finger.The Chancellor of German Unity, the last political survivor of the Reagan-Mitterrand-Thatcher generation, the leader of the most powerful nation in Europe for almost a third of its post-warhistory, was thereby transformed into a quizzical boob passively contemplating a gigantic, wet, just-picked booger...
...She told an interviewer at the SUddeutsche Zeitung she was considering running for chancellor...
...Lafontaine claims to have no more "personal ambition...
...This was a way of talking about real achievements, and of warning against a vote for his heavily favored challenger, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schroder...
...It "will take more time" to work out a detailed plan, say Schroder and his aides...
...But that was part of the problem: The reshaping of the East German society had been carried out exclusively by those who understood how a modern economy works—that is, by those West Germans who, through a sheer accident of geography, had not had to pay for the Nazi regime with four decades of living in the most Stalinist of Eastern European states...
...the SPD took on the PDS as a coalition partner in the Mecklenburg legislature...
...German unity was his life's project, well before November 1989...
...HE PRICE 0C TOGETHERNESS In a sense, Helmut Kohl killed his ruling coalition with success...
...Gott sei dank it's over...
...G DISCO, D I V 0 IMMIG INFLATIOH, WELFARE DEPENDEHCY, AND NEW CHANCELLOR GERHARD SCHRODER...
...Kohl had little to offer except two hours of oompah music followed by twenty minutes of campaign boilerplate...
...Earlier that year, he had offered to trade massive aid to the East for increasing freedom for its residents...
...The Germans may be right to fear their exCommunists less and less...
...Even Kohl's protégé Wolfgang Schauble, the new head of the Christian Democrats, has said that his party would begin to court ex-Communists...
Vol. 31 • December 1998 • No. 12
