Regional polls threaten coalition

Date: 29/02/1996

By Thomas Klau

GERMANY is facing three crucial regional elections, the outcome of which may well seriously threaten the stability of the ruling coalition in Bonn - and profoundly affect the country's future EU policy.

The dominating partner in the federal government, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU), looks set to stabilise or even expand its regional power base in the three polls on 24 March, when voting takes place in the northern land of Schleswig-Holstein and in the south-western states of Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg.

But the embattled liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP), the junior partner in the 13-year-old coalition, is fighting to avert an electoral disaster which could have far-reaching consequences for German - and thus European - politics.

During the Cold War years, the tiny liberal party, usually securing between 5-10&percent; of the vote, was the unchallenged third party and king-maker of German politics, the champion of free-market economics, civil rights and a détente policy towards the Soviet bloc.

But the end of the Cold War, the now general prevalence of a free market ideology and, above all, the rise of the ecology movement and its successful Green Party have combined to rob the FDP of its special appeal.

If the liberals fail to reach the magic threshold of 5&percent; in all three Länder votes, the party will be eliminated from all but one of the Landtage (the 16 German federal states' regional parliaments).

Should this happen, a mood of panic would almost inevitably spread through the ranks of the ruling coalition in Bonn.

While FDP deputies in the Bundestag are generally expected to cling on to their parliamentary seats, hoping for a swing in the party's fortunes before the next general election (scheduled for late 1998), observers do not rule out a series of defections to the opposition Social Democrats.

This might decisively weaken the government's tiny parliamentary majority of 12 and increase the likelihood of the CDU engineering an early switch to a grand coalition with the Social Democrats.

For the CDU leadership, the temptation would be strong to avoid fighting the next general election alongside a liberal party firmly entrenched in the minds of the electorate as a permanent loser.

Thus, at a time when Helmut Kohl would appear to reign supreme over German politics and exert the biggest single influence on the EU's political agenda, the dwindling of the FDP's electoral stock threatens to bring the chancellor's rule to an early end.

Many observers believe Kohl would refuse to preside over a grand coalition, preferring to leave the arduous task of negotiating a pact with the Social Democrats to his crown prince, Wolfgang Schäuble, leader of the CDU's parliamentary group. Such an uneasy alliance would not only amount to a major political upheaval in Germany itself, but would also inject a new feeling of awkwardness into Germany's EU policies.

While the Social Democrats would not be allowed (and, indeed, probably would not want) to stray from Germany's present federalist EU agenda, they might prove to be even more rigid than the Bundesbank in their interpretation of the Maastricht criteria for monetary union, given recent remarks by their leader Oskar Lafontaine questioning the timetable for the single currency.

Thus any Kohl strategy of agreeing to a last-minute relaxation in the interpretation of the criteria to ensure that EMU starts in 1999 would probably be nipped in the bud.

Even if the existing Bonn government were to survive the shock of yet another series of FDP electoral disasters, the chances of the Conservative-Liberal coalition surviving until after the 1998 election would look increasingly bleak.

Bereft of its regional power base, and losing the access to the local media that only a presence in the Landtage can guarantee, the FDP would find it even more difficult to get its message across to the electorate. Already, after 13 years of power sharing with the CDU, the party is finding it difficult to convince a sufficient number of voters that it pursues an agenda significally different from that of the Christian Democrats.

The towering presence of the chancellor also makes it difficult for FDP leaders to come across as more than junior aides to Germany's number one politician.

Against this background of political uncertainty, the chancellor presents his usual imperturbable public face. Kohl routinely brushes off speculation about an early demise of his coalition, and warns against writing off the FDP too soon.

Instead, he continues to appeal to Germans to focus on creating jobs and fulfilling the convergence requirements for participation in monetary union. At the same time, Kohl is calling for an end to the debate about a possible postponement of the start of EMU, scheduled for 1999.

“I think we should stop this discussion”, he said in a recent TV interview. Echoing his Finance Minister Theo Waigel, Kohl refused to speculate about what might happen if Germany itself were unable to meet the convergence criteria in 1997, the decisive year. “Everyone has to do his homework,” Kohl declared, using one of his favourite metaphors.