Kohl power: time is running out for the West's longest serving leader

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by Josef Joffe

HELMUT Kohl today is where FDR would have been had he lived until 1948: in the last year of his fourth term. No other democratic leader has ever served continuously for 16 years. And if the 68-year-old Kohl wins on September 27, he might even wind up besting Otto von Bismarck, who ran the Second Reich for 19 years.

However, Kohl does not have a Kaiser behind him, and right now he looks as likely to win as Jesse Helms would if he were running against Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. Kohl trails his Social Democratic opponent, Gerhard Schroder, by up to 20 points, and his Christian Democrats are morosely waiting for that miracle which, in past years, has always come along in late summer to turn the Left's dreams into dust. Four years ago, the Social Democratic contender, Rudolf Scharping, started out with a 15-point advantage in the spring only to see Kohl dash past him in the fall. But so far, Schroder's lead is refusing to melt away.

Why? If you ask the good German burghers who are the mainstay of Kohl's Conservative Democratic Union, the answer invariably is: "We can't stand the sight of him any more." Boredom, as John Major learned after 18 years of Tory and George Bush after 12 years of Republican ascendancy, is the most implacable enemy of men in power. Germany's twenty- and thirty-somethings can scarcely remember a time without Kohl. Compared to der Dicke (the fat one), with his three hundred pounds or so, the 54-year old Schroder looks like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair rolled into one.

If boring is bad, powerless is worse. Take Kohl's stubborn but vain struggle for tax reform, the No. 1 item on his domestic agenda. Compared to their British and American brethren, Continental Conservatives are anything but gung-ho free-marketeers and flat-taxers. Still, Helmut Kohl strained mightily all of last year to reform Germany's horrendous tax structure.

Currently, a single person with a taxable income of DM120,000 (about $66,000) pays 53 pfennigs on every additional mark, plus 3 pfennigs as reunification surcharge and 4 as church tax if he is officially affiliated. That does not count the payroll deductions for unemployment, social security, and health insurance that all employed Germans must pay. Furthermore, German consumers pay a 16 per cent value-added tax. Public expenditures in Germany eat up more than half of GDP.

Kohl and his supporters had aimed to lower the highest marginal rate to 39 per cent. But Germany has a federal system, with an Upper House, the Bundesrat, representing the states. In the Bundesrat, the majority is held by Schroder's Social Democrats.

Kohl's tax-reform proposal was thus a godsend for his enemies. (Never mind Germany's overtaxed and overregulated economy which, in 1997, had produced an unemployment rate of 12 per cent.) The SPD could block Kohl in an area where he had invested much political capital, while painting the Conservatives as callous minions of the rich. "Look here," was the SPD's message to the voter, "Mr. Big is washed up. He can't deliver, but we will."

And so, the top marginal tax rate is still stuck at 60 per cent. Kohl spells boredom and paralysis while his rival Schroder, he of the toothy smile, currently on his fourth wife, trumpets freshness and dynamism. If you add the last and most critical blow to Kohl's fortunes, namely Germany's 3 to 0 knockout by Croatia (Croatia!) in the quarterfinals of the World Cup, it just has to be curtains for the chancellor.

But wait! This is not America, with direct election of the President, nor even Britain, with winner-take-all voting for each parliamentary seat. Germans do not vote for a chancellor, but for a party. The party percentage translates into seats in the Bundesrat which then chooses the chief executive. So Schroder's double-digit lead in popularity polls has to be put through the critical filter of party preferences. And when the pollsters ask for those, the SPD's lead dwindles to a manageable 5 per cent or so.

No matter how well the Social Democrats do on election day, they are sure to need a coalition partner to put them over the top. And there's the rub. Their partner is the Greens, a party of ecologists and Sixties radicals, which can never decide between power and ideological purity. The internal struggle between the Realpolitikers and the fundamentalists always heats up during election campaigns. Over the past several months, the fundamentalists have pushed every button guaranteed to alienate those middle-of-the-roaders whose votes are indispensable for a Schroder victory.

Germans regard speed limits on the Autobahn the way the National Rifle Association regards gun control; the Greens have come up with a 60 mile-per-hour speed limit on the freeway (20 in towns). They also want to tax gasoline to the point where it will cost $20 a gallon, so as to get people out of their cars and into trams and trains. The Greens' parliamentary spokesman on tourism has rattled the most peripatetic people on earth with a proposal to jack up air fares so that they could no longer "hop off to Mallorca for a long weekend." And so forth.