To the Victors Belong the Bills

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."