Helmut Kohl is encountering a political backlash. With eastern Germany’s economy in a state of near collapse, nearly three quarters of the region’s people say they are “disappointed” with him. Half of all western Germans agree. All Germans will soon shoulder heavy new taxes to pay for reunification - a tax Kohl promised never to impose. Disgruntlement with the chancellor reigns in Western capitals, too, thanks to the German government’s lukewarm embrace of allied effort in the Persian Gulf War. The heady emotions of reunification that carried Kohl to a third term last December have given way to the hard task of welding two unequal societies into a single nation capable of a constructive global role. And many Germans are wondering if their chancellor is up to the job. “Somehow Kohl doesn’t look anymore like the figure who can supervise unification in all of its enormous philosophical, mental and psychological dimensions,” says Meinhard Miegel, director of the Institute for Economy and Society in Bonn. “To truly unify two societies. requires more than a technocratic financial approach.”
Before last year’s rush toward reunification, Kohl’s political future was in doubt. He had been chancellor since 1982, and Germans seemed weary of his plodding and parochial leadership style. The reunification drama transformed Kohl into a political superstar. He eagerly channeled the euphoria into his own re-election campaign, brushing aside warnings of the potential downside. Now the expectations he raised have been dashed. Unemployment there is 30 percent and rising, instead of a land of business expansion, the east is actually a slight drag on growth in the west. The cost of unity to the government is now estimated at $600 billion by the year 2000. The fiscally careful Germans, once exporters of capital, are now borrowers.
Kohl’s fateful decision was his move last July to convert 160 billion near-worthless East German marks into Deutsche marks at a one-to-one exchange rate. Kohl liked the idea because it would put dramatic new purchasing power in the hands of East German consumers who were about to become all-German voters. But the measure was a disaster for East German industry. Formerly socialist firms lost any price advantage they might have enjoyed over western competitors producing superior goods. And with wages rising, even the most efficient eastern businesses were consigned to instant obsolescence. Western investment has not materialized. Speaking in Brussels last week, Karl Otto Pohl, the president of Germany’s central bank, called the quick monetary union - which he opposed at the time “a disaster.” Kohl bristles at I-told-you-sos: “Nobody could expect us to complete a miracle in six months,” he told reporters recently. At a cabinet meeting, the chancellor lashed out at “bad mouthers who always know everything better and never really wanted German unity.”
Recriminations give little comfort. People in the east have ridden an 18-month roller coaster from the depths of Stalinism to the peak of liberation and down again to economic depression. They are now experiencing a collective case of what the Germans rather vaguely call Existenzangst - existential anxiety. Strikes, crime and suicides are spreading, and some of the tension has spilled over into violence: in Dresden last week, right-wing soccer fans attacked players and fans from a visiting Yugoslav team. The erstwhile Communist Free German Youth organization has disintegrated into rival gangs of ultraleftists and cryptofascists. Easterners feel snubbed by “Wessies,” who scorn the “shiftlessness” of their poorer cousins and rarely visit the region except to hurtle down the east’s autobahns on their way to Berlin. “Why don’t they share?” asks an eastern German woman on the train to Leipzig. “The Wessies got everything after the war, and we nothing. We suffered. We’re entitled to help.”
Kohl and his advisers have begun to acknowledge their mistakes and revise their promises. “We have to admit that we miscalculated and deluded ourselves,” said Federal Economics Minister Jurgen Mollemann last week. “There was no way to predict how much longer it would take to activate self-confidence and entrepreneurial behavior in people who have been deprived of freedom for 58 years.” The tax hikes will help meet some of the increased costs, although another recently floated German idea for raising money to help the east - trimming Bonn’s contribution to the U.S. effort in the gulf - might estrange Kohl further from his allies.
But Kohl insists that quick reunification was the right course. Citing the increasingly conservative drift of Soviet policy, he argued last week the policy “was a one-time historical chance, the opportunity of the moment, whatever you want to call it.” Even Kohl’s critics concede that point. For all the woes Germany is experiencing now, few maintain it would have been better to leave the Communists in power in the east. Over time the benefits of reunification, to both east and west, should far outweigh the costs. Helmut Kohl is betting Germans’ patience will ultimately outweigh their Existenzangst.
