German voters endorse Kohl’s European policies

Date: 28/03/1996

By Thomas Klau

GERMAN voters sent a clear message of support to Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling coalition - and its strongly pro-European policies - in three key regional elections last weekend which saw the Social Democrats receive a thrashing and confirmed the Greens as a stable force in German politics.

With the embattled liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) achieving unexpectedly strong showings in all three Länder, and the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) scoring slight gains, the Bonn coalition received surprisingly unambiguous backing from an electorate deeply worried about growing unemployment and the need for further cost-cutting in German industry.

The vote has substantially strengthened Chancellor Kohl's hand as he prepares to go into battle at the Intergovernmental Conference in pursuit of his dream of closer political union in Europe - and it has confounded those who suggested that his ardent support for the single currency was damaging the government's standing with German voters.

The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands' (SPD) share of the votes, meanwhile, shrank in all three elections.

In the important south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, where the Social Democrats waged a highly controversial election campaign with distinctly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant overtones, the party met with disaster. Germany's main opposition party attracted no more than 25&percent; of the vote, prompting its local leader Dieter Spöri to relinquish all leadership posts.

The SPD's miserable showing in Baden-Württemberg is also a personal defeat for new party leader Oskar Lafontaine, who had backed the local party's much-criticised shift towards a populist agenda, while whipping up fears about the burdens of monetary union and the unfettered immigration of ethnic Germans.

The rejection the Social Democrats suffered from an electorate opting for stability was secretly welcomed by many German Socialist MEPs, who viewed with dismay the party leadership's efforts to woo the electorate with anti-EMU rhetoric and Eurosceptic remarks.

The collapse of that strategy - and Lafontaine's apparent lack of electoral appeal - might well send the SPD into a new and prolonged period of damaging public wrangling about the best platform for the general election scheduled for the last months of 1998.

In the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, the SPD's substantial losses mean the party will have to enter a coalition, probably with the Greens, to keep its hold on government.

In the western state of Rheinland-Pfalz, the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals managed to hang on to their parliamentary majority, thanks to the swollen FDP share of the vote.

For the Liberals, who had been haunted by fears of complete electoral annihilation at regional level after the party was ejected from most Länder parliaments during previous regional polls, Sunday's vote brought a much-needed respite.

It confirmed the old suspicion that voters will save the FDP whenever the party seems seriously threatened, and took pressure off the coalition in Bonn, where the Liberals' weakness was perceived as the biggest threat to the government's long-term survival.

The true impact on the balance of power in Bonn, however, is more psychological than real. While the Social Democrats' majority in the Bundesrat has been slightly weakened, the Federal government will still need to negotiate with the SPD if it wants to achieve substantial reform.