Kohl faces potential threat to Union goals

Date: 23/11/1995

By Thomas Klau

YET again, he caught everybody off guard, including, perhaps, himself. With a single, rhetorically brilliant speech at his party's congress, Saarland Premier Oskar Lafontaine last week mortally wounded his embattled leader Rudolf Scharping and, after a night of feverish speculation, was voted to the helm of Germany's Social Democrats.

It would be mistaken to read the surprise switch from stolid Scharping to mercurial Lafontaine as a sign of fundamental change in the SPD's political course. For one, Scharping came through his ousting with undiminished personal standing and has retained the presidency of the SPD group in the Bundestag. The splitting of the party's top positions between two temperamentally - and sometimes politically - opposed politicians will continue to force the SPD into uneasy internal compromises over issues such as the extent of Germany's military involvement abroad.

But while his biography, conviction and inclinations have undoubtedly fashioned Lafontaine into a deeply-committed European, he is also on the record as one of the few early and outspoken critics of the monetary scenario agreed on in the Maastricht Treaty.

Lafontaine puts his dismal performance in the 1990 elections down to his strong warnings against the dire economic consequences of inner-German monetary union as decided by the Kohl government. Having been deceived once, he says, the German people will not twice accept huge tax bills that their political leaders forgot to tell them about.

And without a sufficient degree of convergence, Lafontaine argues, present plans for economic and monetary union are bound to lead to massive job losses, huge transfer payments and hefty tax increases throughout the EU. “I want to be sure that monetary union is not carried out ... without people being perfectly clear what it means to them,” Lafontaine said earlier this month.

His election could thus present a real challenge to the government's plan to secure the EU's political union through the backdoor of EMU. Should he push doubts about monetary union as one of the key issues in the 1998 general election, Lafontaine could point to his own early misgivings to fend off charges of a last-minute pandering to electoral populism. His well-known distrust of German patriotism, coupled with a penchant for a Latin lifestyle, should also shield him from accusations of nationalism that might otherwise alienate parts of the party and electorate.

Lafontaine could prove equally troublesome on some other important European issues. A spearhead of the SPD's opposition to the stationing of cruise missiles in the early Eighties, Lafontaine has cast himself as the stalwart defender of the SPD's pacifist tradition, vigorously resisting even a limited easing of Germany's self-imposed restrictions on waging war abroad.

Given his record of coupling brilliance with blunder, conviction with tactics and craftiness with impulsiveness, it is too early to predict how Lafontaine might use his increased influence to shape Germany's political debate. His surprise bid for his party's top job, while galvanising many faithful, has opened fresh wounds in an SPD that is deeply hurt by the last months of bitter leadership infighting.

If he can stop the series of electoral disasters that has driven the SPD into a frenzy of despair since last year's Bundestag elections, the party's nomination in 1998 as candidate for the chancellorship should be Lafontaine's for the asking. But it is far too early to say whether he would stand a chance of toppling the seemingly unshakeable Kohl.