Racing Down to the Wire

By George Russell

As the campaign nears the end, Kohl's prospects improve

Helmut Kohl, 52, was suffused with optimism last week as he and senior election strategists huddled over breakfast in Bonn's chancellery. With only three weeks remaining until West Germany's March 6 national elections, the tall, affable leader was considering some heartening news. According to a poll published in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Kohl's Christian Democratic Party and its ally in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, were leading the rival Social Democrats 49% to 42%. Those figures marked a 1.5% rise in the popularity of Chancellor Kohl's conservative grouping from the previous week, and an almost identical decline for the Social Democrats. Said Kohl: "Things are now going in our direction."

The Chancellor is still far from victory in West Germany's volatile and, perhaps, pivotal election campaign. The stakes include not only the Chancellor's office, but the direction of West German foreign policy and possibly even the future of the NATO alliance. The reason: as the campaign has progressed, the electorate has become increasingly polarized over the placement of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles on West German soil. A poll for Der Spiegel published a week ago showed that approval of the so-called two-track NATO strategy of deploying the missiles, while simultaneously pursuing arms talks with the Soviets, has jumped from 38% to 51% among Christian Democratic supporters. At the same time, however, approval among Social Democrats declined from 37% to 26%.

Before Kohl called the elections more than four months ago, hardly anyone could have predicted that West German politics would have become so muddled. Though the Social Democrats had been in office for 13 years, their popularity had reached a low of 27.5%, compared with 54% for the Christian Democrats. The Social Democrats were tired and tattered by factional disputes centering on Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's pro-NATO defense policy and his management of the economy. When Kohl and the Christian Democrats took office in October, some Social Democrat leaders predicted that their demoralized party would recover only after long years in opposition.

Even before the election campaign began, however, Kohl's rosy political prospects started to fade. First, a wave of sympathy began to build for the defeated Schmidt, whose term of office ended when the small, centrist Free Democratic Party deserted his coalition to join Kohl's conservative alignment. Then Kohl faced a voter backlash for the way he arranged the election call, by stage-managing a vote of confidence against himself in the Bundestag. That maneuver has been contested by four Bundestag members before West Germany's Constitutional Court.

Paradoxically, Kohl has also suffered from his brief period of incumbency. With monthly business failures hitting an alltime high of 1,257 in December and an unemployment rate of 10.2%, many voters are blaming Kohl for failing to arrange a quick upturn in the economy, though the new Chancellor has had little time to make much difference in the face of unavoidable economic difficulty.

An even bigger surprise for Kohl has been the strength of his new opponent. A former mayor of Munich and West Berlin, Hans-Jochen Vogel, 57, was named as the Social Democrats' candidate for Chancellor shortly after Schmidt left office. Lacking Schmidt's flair and experience, Vogel has moved the party steadily to the left. He has demanded that the U.S. and the Soviets sign an arms agreement that would make it unnecessary for NATO to install the Pershing and cruise missiles. That stand brought cheers from the Social Democrats' left wing. In addition, it drew away potential support for the Greens, West Germany's environmentalist antinuclear movement. Since the campaign began, popular support for the Greens has dropped from 9% to 5%, with the difference presumably going to the Social Democrats.

Vogel has also skillfully taken advantage of his party's new-found opposition status to thunder at Kohl for the dismal condition of the economy. Said Vogel in a speech in the industrial center of Dortmund: "Kohl maintains that the German rate of unemployment is a result of too extravagant social benefits. How false! How superficial!"

Kohl's response has been consistent with his reassuringly stolid image: a steady plugging away at conservative themes of hard work, austerity and unswerving adherence to NATO and the U.S. nuclear umbrella as the mainstays of West German wellbeing. His party has hired Ken Randal, 44, a New York City television director, to make a series of hard-sell commercials, reminding the electorate that most of the country's economic problems were inherited from the Social Democrats. In one TV spot, a woman pensioner leafs through a photo album and reminisces wistfully about the 1950s, when Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democrats were in power. Concludes the lady: "Now there's Kohl. I trust him. We need to work together to put the mess right."

The Kohl hard sell is improving his party's ratings but not yet by enough to ensure a clear majority in the Bundestag. In former days, that would have left the balance of power with the Free Democrats. But last week's poll in Der Spiegel shows that party gaining only 4% of the vote, up from previous soundings but still one percentage point less than the mini mum required for the Free Democrats to hold any Bundestag seats. The Greens did make the threshold, barely, with 5% in the poll. As a result, there is a possibility that the Greens might displace the Free Democrats as the pivotal third force in the Bundestag. That outcome could well bring political disaster, in the form of a deadlocked government. For NATO, any thing short of a Kohl majority could also bring a paralyzing reconsideration of the crucial European missile issue. Despite his rising fortunes, Kohl had plenty of reason to redouble his efforts as the race entered its final days.

--By George Russell. Reported by Roland Flamini/Bonn

With reporting by Roland Flamini This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.