TIME EUROPE
JANUARY 31, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 4
The Harder They Fall
Waves of scandal finally wash the immovable Helmut Kohl overboard
By CHARLES P. WALLACE Berlin
One newspaper headline cried out: "Father murder!" Some of Germany's most experienced, cynical politicians broke down and wept. The "father" was none other than Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor who unified Germany and helped exorcise the ghost of Adolf Hitler from the Continent. No blood was spilled. The "murder" was of his political reputation. Kohl was forced to resign as honorary chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, because of a blossoming financial scandal. The statesman who counted Bill Clinton and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev among his peers had been brought down by the likes of a French wheeler-dealer nicknamed Dédé the Sardine.
The political demise of Kohl quickly took on the elements of a Greek tragedy, complete with reversals of fortune and fatal character flaws. It probably reached its nadir late last week when Wolfgang Hüllen, the official in charge of finance for the CDU's parliamentary faction, committed suicide as the Bundestag opened its investigation into the scandal. While the reasons for the suicide were hazy, Hüllen apparently feared arrest for diverting cash from party coffers to his own account.
Kohl's fall struck at the very heart of German politics and threatened the future of the CDU. As recently as last November he was hailed as a national hero at the Brandenburg Gate for deftly steering his country through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Last week he was demonized as a national embarrassment. The mass circulation magazine Stern ran Kohl's photo on its cover showing the former Chancellor dappled with mud. Television's most popular interview show lampooned him as Helmut Kohleone, a Teutonic gangster godfather.
Throughout the public humiliation, the 69-year-old Kohl remained stubbornly defiant, at times dropping his grandfatherly demeanor in a burst of anger. As he had since the scandal first erupted late last year, he steadfastly refused to name the sources of at least $1.2 million in unreported campaign contributions. He acknowledged using the cash to set up secret bank accounts and then funneling money to favored CDU politicians, all of which was illegal under stringent campaign laws introduced by none other than Kohl himself during his 16 years as Chancellor. Kohl angered even his most stalwart supporters by implying that his promise of anonymity to the sources of the illegal money was more important than the law.
"I regard myself as incapable of breaking my promise to several people who supported my work in the CDU financially," Kohl said in announcing his resignation as honorary chairman of the party. While acknowledging having made mistakes, Kohl insisted that honor and duty prevented him from saying more. But the CDU presidium, which demanded Kohl's resignation, noted that "Kohl fails in his duty as honorary chairman if he refuses to contribute to the efforts to overcome the crisis."
The scandal quickly engulfed the leadership of the CDU, threatening the party's election prospects and leaving a question mark hanging over the entire German political system. Wolfgang Schäuble, Kohl's handpicked successor as party leader, offered to resign after admitting that he had also received a $52,000 cash contribution from an arms dealer that went mysteriously unreported, but the party's leadership threatened a mass resignation if he quit. "The party is in danger of falling apart and if that happens you have to wonder which parties will attract right wing voters," said Peter Lösche, a political scientist at the University of Göttingen. Lösche noted that the German People's Union, financed by a right-wing publisher, had recently scored electoral gains. "This scandal could be important for the entire German political structure, not just the CDU."
In the short term, the scandal was a godsend to Germany's current Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, who defeated Kohl in Bundestag elections in September 1998. Schröder found his own popularity rising nearly as fast as Kohl's sank. An opinion poll published last week by the Forsa polling organization said that Schröder was supported by 44% of voters, up 3%, compared with only 14% support for the CDU's Schäuble, a depressing decline of 6% over the previous week. Before the funding scandal erupted last November, Schröder's ruling Social Democratic Party had been trounced by the CDU in five state and local elections because of popular discontent with Schröder's economic policies. The next election face-off comes next month in the key state of Schleswig-Holstein, with early indications showing the spd heading for an easy victory.
It was still not clear whether Kohl would agree to appear before the Bundestag's official committee of investigation, which included seven members of the opposition spd and five CDU loyalists, to discuss his role in the scandal. At least one key detail had already emerged from the committee's first day of work: Schröder's office confirmed that it had searched the official archives for material at the request of the committee and found that a number of key documents "seem to be missing," according to Schröder spokesman Bela Anda. Schäuble used the first day of the parliamentary debate to finally apologize to the nation for the party's misdeeds. The CDU, he said, had "quite clearly violated the law and damaged trust in the integrity of democratic institutions."
In addition to the parliamentary inquiry into the funding scandal, Kohl also faces criminal investigation by prosecutors in Bonn for breach of trust, which carries a maximum sentence of five years. According to legal experts, the case could be difficult to prove unless officials of the CDU are willing to testify to having been victimized by Kohl, who led the party for 25 years. Trying to bolster their case, prosecutors raided the apartment of a Kohl confidant in a search for incriminating documents.
It was also clear that there were many more damaging disclosures still to come. Party officials disclosed that an audit of the party's books by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young revealed nearly $5 million in additional donations whose source could not be determined. Perhaps even worse, the party branch in the state of Hesse admitted that in the 1980s the party "parked" $4 million in secret Swiss bank accounts. By the 1990s, the sum had mysteriously grown to $15 million and $2 million of the total had disappeared without a trace.
Manfred Kanther, a former Interior Minister who had publicly claimed to be stamping out corruption while in office, became the first political casualty of the funding scandal when he resigned his seat in parliament after admitting the illegal cash movements when he was head of the CDU in Hesse. The Social Democrats quickly announced that they would seek to throw out the results of the most recent Hesse election, won by the CDU by a slim margin, claiming the tainted money gave the CDU an unfair advantage.
If it wasn't bad enough to admit money laundering, the CDU's former treasurer in Hesse, an aristocrat named Casimir zu Sayn-Wittgenstein compounded the party's problems by suggesting initially that the funds weren't illegal, but bequests from deceased Jews. Michel Friedman, deputy leader of the Central Council of Jews, reacted angrily to the suggestion of Jewish involvement. "This is a scandal within a scandal, infamous, irresponsible and dangerous," Friedman said.
While most Germans said they accepted Kohl's contention that he had not personally benefited from the secret donations, the illegal payments nonetheless rankled many voters because, in the words of political scientist Hajo Funke, "the fear is that government policy was bought."
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