The Party's Over: Kohl's Disservice to German Democracy
Germany's huge financial scandal shook more than just Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats. The country's party cartel system may be crumbling -- and fast.
Robert Gerald Livingston, former Director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is currently writing a book on Germany's relationship with the United States.
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.
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Seventeen months of intricate negotiation involving the four powers responsible for Germany, the two German states and the North Atlantic and Warsaw Treaty alliances have finally yielded a Berlin agreement. It is the first major East-West accord in Europe since the Austrian State Treaty in 1955 and suggests that old-fashioned diplomacy still has its virtues. The agreement's provisions, which are far better than Western foreign offices dared hope when the negotiations began, regulate the thorniest aspects of the Berlin problem, notably the access issue. But they do not solve the problem in the sense of establishing a new status for the city. Indeed, whether the agreement holds up at all depends on whether the present détente in Europe continues. Experience with Soviet policy has taught that this is not predictable. One result is, however, certain: the agreement compels the West to come fully to terms soon with the second German state. The German Democratic Republic is becoming, as Alice might put it, permanenter and permanenter.
The big man was crucial to his country's unification and looms large in the drive for European union, but German policy has a long-running life of its own.
Recognition of the GDR by the FRG would be a "political masterstroke", in which merely formal separation would be outweighed by substantive unity on various social and economic issues. See also Margarita Mathiopoulos 'Peace would settle the German question' IHT 1 Nov 1989 p6.

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