By Sept. 22, when they finally get to cast their votes, German electors will be forgiven if they are completely bored with politics and politicians. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has done them no favor by launching his own election campaign fully three weeks ahead of the start of the official hustings.
The beleaguered chancellor kicked off his drive for a second term in Hanover, his hometown, before an enthusiastic crowd of 10,000 supporters. A bus tour of more than 40 towns and cities across Germany follows. Unfortunately for the chancellor, the political pundits are not giving much for his chances of retaining power. They see his premature start to the campaign as a sign of his desperation. His Social Democratic Party won in 1998 with an unequivocal promise to cut unemployment. Four years on, the Schroeder government has spectacularly to deliver. Far from dropping below the 3.5 million mark, as he had assured voters it would, the jobless figure still remains high. This major failure, coupled with allegations of sleaze, which have underlain most of the eight ministerial resignations in Schroeder’s four-year administration, appear to have delivered the chancellor a fatal blow. Polls show that his Christian Democrat rival Edmund Stoiber is several points ahead and on course to return the Christian Democrats to power.
Schroeder has endeavored to shift the political ground away from his catastrophic failure to get Germany back to work. He has accused Stoiber of being so pro-American that he will back US plans to attack Iraq. Schroeder has maintained a consistently critical stand over the likelihood of a US assault on Baghdad, but since it is most unlikely that German troops would be involved, at the moment most voters probably do not care. His further argument however, that a US attack would destabilize regional politics and perhaps plunge the world into greater economic and financial misery, might possibly start to register with an electorate who have had quite enough of the bad times already.
Germany’s current economic limbo should be a cause for wider concern. History has shown that when mainstream political parties can find no solution for intractable economic problems, the extremists start to come out of the woodwork. Germany still harbors an unpleasant undercurrent of racism, which has been directed against immigrants whose efforts once fueled the country’s economic miracle. Both main parties now talk tough on further reversing once-liberal immigration laws.
Meanwhile, the neo-fascist bigots are waiting in the wings. They have found sympathetic ears in the depressed former industrial states of eastern Germany. Any worsening of the economic position will play into their hands. If they can garner sufficient support among the disappointed and dejected unemployed, at this moment, more than at any other time in Germany’s postwar history, they could mount an alarming electoral challenge.
It would, therefore, be an extremely wise move if both the two main parties united at the start of this election, to make it clear that they repudiated absolutely all of the hateful racist policies of the far right and will, where necessary, even unite to defeat any electoral challenge from these odious people.
