TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 124 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 50

GERMANY

To the Victors Belong the Bills


Integrating the long-divided land will cost the new Bonn
government $220 billion over the next four years

By DANIEL BENJAMIN/BRANDENBURG


    The election was to be the stirring climax to 13 months of
breathtaking change. As the first all-German ballot since 1932,
when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party won a
plurality, Sunday's vote was portrayed as the ultimate moment
of a historical closure. A little more than a year after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and two months after unification, the
polling for a new Bundestag would be a celebration of democracy
and the end to years of division.

    Although the voting surely was such a milestone, it appeared
that Germans felt they had had, at least for a while, enough
of history on a grand scale. Christian Democratic Chancellor
Helmut Kohl, 60, and his coalition partners took a 19-point
lead into the election, seemingly assuring them of victory over
Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine. The anticipated margin was
large enough to leave Christian Democrats fretting that it
might be eroded by a low voter turnout. Said a civil servant
in the Rhineland: "It's certainly no Schicksalswahl [election
of destiny]."

    A year ago, before revolution toppled the Communists in what
used to be the German Democratic Republic, so matter-of-fact
an assessment would have been unthinkable. Lafontaine, the
charismatic Saarland state premier, looked like a strong
challenger to Kohl, who was less respected and less popular
than his party. Lafontaine, 47, appealed to younger voters as
a maverick who ranged wide of the Social Democratic
establishment and party orthodoxy. A pacifist, keen on
environmental issues and allergic to any invocation of
nationalist sentiment, he was touted as the "posthistorical
politician." In his campaign, Lafontaine even shunned using the
black, red and gold colors of the flag.

    Then he got waylaid by history. After the Wall came down,
he advocated a go-slow policy on unification. And when the
unity drive picked up steam, he attacked Kohl's claim that it
could be financed without straining national resources and
raising taxes. What Lafontaine underestimated was the depth of
feeling on both sides of the old Iron Curtain in favor of
merging the two Germanys -- and with that his strategy
backfired. His effectiveness as a campaigner was also
undermined by near tragedy: in April a deranged woman plunged
a knife into his neck, just missing the carotid artery. The
assassination attempt forced Lafontaine into a two-month
convalescence; he abandoned shaking hands and signing
autographs and gave his campaign speeches surrounded by a
phalanx of bodyguards.

    All the while, the Chancellor's popularity rose with the
deft handling of the complex negotiations that brought about
merger in October. Unity, said the liberal weekly Die Zeit,
"rescued him." It also obscured all other issues. The theme of
unification, says Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, head of the
Allensbach polling institute, "was completely constant from the
onset of the campaign, dominating it to the exclusion of any
other everyday issue." The juggernaut rolled over Lafontaine.

    The problems ahead will test all the skills of the new
government in Bonn. The most pressing task is to determine how
to pay for unification. Current projections call for an
expenditure of roughly $55 billion annually for the next four
years for building infrastructure and providing social support
in the eastern part of the country. In the months leading up
to the election, Kohl resisted a tax hike, preferring instead
to rely on spending cuts, the sale of public assets in western
and eastern Germany, and large-scale borrowing. Few expect
that the government will be able to follow this tack much
longer; loading too great a burden on taxpayers, however, risks
feeding internal west-east resentments that could add to the
already heavy burden of national integration.

    To those living in eastern Germany, no amount of assistance
and investment will be large enough or delivered fast enough.
The number of unemployed in the region, estimated at half a
million, threatens to expand further as enterprises come to the
end of the interim period during which they had to keep
underemployed workers on their payrolls. Some economists warn
that half of the 8.5 million workers in the East could lose
their jobs. Patience in the East is wearing thin: violence,
including some directed against the small number of foreigners
in the area, has been growing sharply.

    More troubling, trust is scarce. "Everyone has the fear that
things will get worse because a lot of undemocratic decisions
are being made," complained a 72-year-old pensioner in
Brandenburg, about 37 miles west of Berlin, last week. Many
eastern Germans feel they have no control over their future.
"The Round Table," said the pensioner, referring to the group
of citizen-representatives that briefly shared power with the
last Communist government in East Berlin, "was democracy for
me." Many easterners are upset too at having to lower their
expectations of the changes they thought unification would
bring. Said Verena Bernau, an unemployed mother of two: "Kohl
made a lot of promises, but in practice there are no results."

    In the days before the voting, easterners were griping as
well about a kind of democracy fatigue. Sunday was the fourth
time they were going to the polls since March, when East
Germany elected its first post-Communist parliament. In
Brandenburg some said they were tired of campaigns and
elections; others that they felt their votes, amid millions of
ballots, counted for nothing. In an open-air market run by
unemployed workers, one woman, retaining the old reluctance to
give her name, dismissed any worry about absenteeism. Casting
an eye backward in time, she said, "Of course they'll vote.
It's a secret ballot."