The Party's Over: Kohl's Disservice to German Democracy

Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's secret, illegal fundraising has corroded the German public's trust in its political parties and in the party-dominated system itself. The revelations that surfaced in late autumn 1999 of illegal slush funds, secret bank accounts, and money laundering of campaign funds have undermined Kohl's vaunted reputation as the father of reunified Germany. Understandably, the financial scandal also dramatically diminished public support for his Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

But as the sordid story continues to unfold and Kohl stubbornly refuses to reveal his donors, it also weakens public confidence in all political parties, whose stability and influence were the most marked characteristics of West German political life for a quarter century. And the scandal has disgusted eastern Germans who, already resentful of western German political dominance, are now commenting that unification in 1990 meant simply exchanging one rotten system (in which communists ruled) for another (in which money rules).

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BONN

In the Bonn republic, political parties were the most influential political institutions, governing according to the gospel of "reliability, calculability, stability, and continuity." They remain predominant today in the Berlin republic of unified Germany. Mainstream organizations such as the CDU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) are highly structured, from the national to the local level, and include diverse affiliates. They are lavishly funded by private and public contributions. The latest annual accounting of the CDU to the parliament (recently corrected in response to the scandal) shows that about 30 percent of the party's 1998 income of 252 million marks ($134 million) came from taxpayers.