EUROPE	MARCH 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 11
	The Challenger Is Gerhard Schroder, the man who would be Kohl, Germany's Chancellor-in-waiting? By JORDAN BONFANTE /HANOVER ate one cold January evening after a hard day's campaigning in Hanover, Gerhard Schroder was relaxing over scampi and grappa with a handful of chums at his favorite hangout, the Roma on Goethe Strasse. Then, in the midst of the back-slapping revelry, came a serious interlude. "My only problem is becoming the choice of my party," Schroder confided to his mates. "After that, I would be unstoppable." The rising politician solved his "problem" last week, becoming the standard bearer of Germany's Social Democratic Party. Now, in the six-month run-up to September's national election, he'll try to make good on his supremely confident prediction--even as the forces of Helmut Kohl's center-right coalition do their utmost to defend their 16-year record and re-elect their man to an unprecedented fifth term as chancellor. Members of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union and its allied parties must have shuddered last week as Schroder, 53, basked in the glory of victory in a benchmark Lower Saxony regional vote. He dominated TV screens with relative youth and vigor as he repeated his pointed refrain about the "end of the Kohl era." One gushing TV report called him "the SPD Superman." Schroder's bigger-than-expected win in his race to retain the premiership of Lower Saxony compelled SPD national leader Oskar Lafontaine to drop his rival claim to the candidacy for chancellor. Just as polls closed Lafontaine stepped out of his Saarland house in a red cardigan and, offering glasses of schnapps to the waiting TV crews, proclaimed Schroder the SPD's best hope for defeating Kohl. The challenger's emergence indeed heightened the odds of a change of government in Europe's biggest country--a change of regime, actually--at just the moment when Europe is to embark on Economic and Monetary Union and adopt its euro. And it raised the possibility that, following the victories last year by Tony Blair's Labour Party in Britain and Lionel Jospin's Socialists in France, Europe's center of gravity could heave back toward the left after an era of conservatism. More immediately, the Lower Saxony vote was a personal rebuff to Kohl, who had made 11 campaign appearances in support of Christian Wulff, the CDU challenger for the premiership. Schroder's comfortable gain of 3.5 percentage points over his score in the 1994 elections came from 200,000 new voters, who, according to exit polls, wanted either to help nominate Schroder over Lafontaine or to express discontent with Bonn. Consider Dieter Roggenkamp, 48, a school principal in Garbsen, and his wife Gudrun, 46, a teacher, who with their two grown sons planned to vote for Schroder, and clapped loudly at his final campaign rally in an old Hanover bus depot. "Lafontaine is not bad, but we prefer our own Schroder," said Dieter. "My vote's aimed at unemployment," complained Gudrun. "The companies are earning more profits, and yet we have more unemployment--now that means we need to change economic policy in Bonn." Figures released last week showed that the German jobless rate stood at 12.6%, which is nearly a record high. The CDU had hoped to face Lafontaine, an ideological workers-rights leftist against whom it could have mounted what Germans call a Socialist-bashing "red socks" campaign. Instead Kohl now has to fight for the center against Schroder, a business-friendly pragmatist determined to attract the youthful moderates of what he calls the "new middle." To beckon them, he stressed "modernization" and investments in education as well as gradual tax cuts, while deriding Kohl, 67, as over the hill. "The leaders in Bonn are incapable of harnessing the creative energies of our people for the 21st century," charged the would-be chancellor. To counter Schroder's personalized campaigning--the SPD's first attempt at that since Willy Brandt in the '70s--the CDU, according to one of its officials, will itself aim to "personalize the campaign around Helmut Kohl and emphasize three issues--the euro, law and order, and unemployment--all of which will be closely linked to him personally." To carry that off, Kohl was being urged to curtail his foreign summiteering and pay more attention to the home front. When assailed about the country's 4.8 million unemployed, for example, Kohl will underscore that needed reforms to create jobs were blocked by the SPD, which controls the upper-house Bundesrat. Behind the scenes, however, were sotto voce grumblings that Kohl was perhaps hanging on too long and that the party might be better off if he were to step aside and hand the candidacy to popular majority leader Wolfgang Schauble, 53. "Anyone in responsibility has to be self-critical," hinted Heiner Geissler, a longtime CDU maverick. "The ball is in Kohl's court and the decision is entirely up to him." Most others ruled out any possible switch in midstream, however. Shrugs one coalition official in the Bundestag: "If the CDU were to switch to Schauble, they wouldn't need to run, because they wouldn't stand a chance." Kohl supporters have grudging respect for Schroder because he shares some of the Chancellor's traits--agility on TV, toughness, and most of all, high ambition. Told and retold in Bonn last week was the tale of Schroder as a freshman M.P. in Bonn in 1982 who, after an evening of pub-crawling, found himself in front of the Chancellery--newly occupied by Helmut Kohl that year. Schroder shook the gates, shouting, "I want to get in there." As a centrist in a largely leftist party, Schroder has at times straddled contradictory policies. At home in Lower Saxony he developed a reputation for wanting more labor flexibility and "reasonable wage claims" and less dependence on public welfare. He favors British and U.S.-style welfare-to-work reforms and refused to endorse an SPD proposal to fine companies that did not produce requisite numbers of apprenticeships. On the other hand, he showed an interventionist streak by twice using state funds to buy local factories to prevent foreign companies from taking them over and threatening jobs. The actions earned him local votes, but also exposed him to Wulff's jeers that he is an "economic amateur" who wants to "drive away the foreign investment we crave." Schroder has expressed skepticism about the euro in the past and last summer briefly argued in favor of its postponement. The difference with Kohl over the new currency is one of emphasis, however, and as one diplomat says, "The euro train has left the station and no matter who wins in September, he'll have to stay on board." A Schroder government, though, could affect the balance of power in Europe. He is an undisguised Anglophile and could gradually transform the Franco-German axis into a broader British-French-German triangle. "The Franco-German relationship, which worked well for four decades, is outdated," says Margarita Mathiopoulos, professor of foreign-policy studies at the University of Braunschweig. "If we want to build Europe, then Britain--with such a powerful economy and with increasingly European and pro-German views--has to play a larger role." Will Schroder be the German Blair? He would like nothing better and two weeks ago was only too happy to travel to London and have German TV show him being ushered into 10 Downing St. by the British Prime Minister. The comparison can go only so far, however, because, as an SPD official in Hanover points out, "Blair himself would not be able to be Blair without Thatcher who came before him, and did all the dirty work of Britain's economic reformation. Here in Germany we haven't had a Thatcher." The German Clinton? A strong Clinton admirer, Schroder has said he wants to model his strategy on Clinton's re-election campaign of '96--"jobs and the middle class." "We have reached into the new middle ground, which is also the service sector and the self-employed," Schroder said last week. "We must target them and reach them nationally." That was a far cry from the appeal to red bandanna industrial workers that Lafontaine would have made, and it was surely the last thing Helmut Kohl wanted to hear. --With Reporting by Nigel Tandy /Hanover
time-webmaster@pathfinder.com