Life after Kohl? We'll Always Have Germany

"His Eternality" is how the leader of Germany's Greens once referred to him. Indeed, Helmut Kohl has led his country for 15 years, the longest tenure of any chancellor this century. Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterrand, who shared the international stage with him when he took office in 1982, are all history. But the determined Bundeskanzler, 67, has announced that he will run for yet another four-year term, his fifth, in September 1998.

By far the senior leader among the industrialized nations, Kohl dominates German and European politics more than any chancellor since World War II. He made possible the rapid yet smooth achievement of German unity seven years ago. He arrogates an air of indispensability in the next great project, the creation of a single currency for the European Union (EU), which he is promoting as the one sure way to permanently embed Germany in an irreversibly united Europe. And ever since he backed deployment of American missiles in Germany at the start of his first term, which his predecessor Helmut Schmidt was unable to do, Kohl has presented himself as essential to maintaining Germany's alliance with the United States.

Despite his air of confident irreplaceability and his historic achievement of unification, there is a whiff of failure in Bonn's autumn air, a hint that the Kohl era is drawing to a close. The chancellor is facing complex domestic economic problems for which his political talents seem unsuited and with which his tired and ineffective ministers of finance and economics are manifestly incapable of dealing. These include a persistent economic performance gap between eastern and western Germany; structural unemployment of nearly 12 percent, the highest since the 1930s; and high social benefits that make both problems harder to deal with because they undermine the competitiveness of an economy dependent on exports.

THE TOWERING OAK

Kohl's long tenure typifies Germany's astonishing political continuity. From 1949, when the Federal Republic was established, until 1990, when it unified with the once-communist east, there were but two changes of power: in 1969, when Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party (SPD) came in, and in 1982, when Kohl's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took power back from Helmut Schmidt's SPD. Even unification's tremors did not shake up the system; seven years later, the chancellor and most of his ministers are still in place.