By Reinhard Hesse * When Gerhard Schröder, the opposition Social Democratic Party's (SPD) candidate for the office of German chancellor, launched his latest book in Berlin last Thursday, the time spent celebrating the author's achievements was shorter than he might have wished. Instead, Schröder was soon besieged by demands that he comment on certain recent statements by hi-tech industrialist Jost Stollmann, his designated minister of the economy. Stollmann, who is not a member of the SPD, had called for a profound reform of the tax and welfare systems and criticised high state subsidies for "old, uncompetitive industries". These remarks, in turn, drew massive criticism, mainly from Germany's powerful trade unions who are generally considered as staunch allies of the SPD. Schröder's response to his interrogation was relaxed. If he had opted for a high-profile, innovative industrialist, instead of choosing someone from the party hierarchy for the job, he said, it was precisely because he wanted to introduce a few new ideas as well as some "fresh blood". Needless to say, this reply went down well with the audience. After all, the title of Schröder's book is As We Change Our Country. Change seems to be the one thing the German people know they want when election day comes round on 27 September. It is true there have been quite a few changes already. For instance, the telecoms monopoly of once unchallenged Deutsche Telekom has gone. The German currency, too, is set to lose its former hegemony with the introduction of the "Euro". But the economic innovations seem only to have whetted the appetite for political novelty. Germany has been ruled for a substantial period (16 years) by a conservative government which, like those of George Bush or John Major, may be well regarded abroad, but has a poor record for solving problems at home. But it is not only "new faces" people want to see: with unemployment soaring to an all-time post-war high, what most Germans mean when they ask for change is, first and foremost, jobs. Apparently a majority of voters believes the SPD will be better able to meet this demand than the outgoing coalition have been. For unemployment remains frighteningly high, despite a considerable economic recovery. The prevailing opinion is that creating jobs is simply too expensive, given the so-called "social costs" that add as much as 50 per cent to the average salary. Only the Social Democrats, people now believe, have sufficient credibility with the interested parties to be able to bring about much-needed reforms in health care, unemployment insurance and pension funding. The process will be one of painful compromise. In fin-de-siècle Europe, only the left can command the popular support required, not to reinforce, but to redesign -- and partly dismantle -- the state. Yet Germany is not a country with a reputation for changing governments. In fact, during the 50 years of its existence, the Federal Republic has only switched its politics twice -- only once as a result of an election. That was in 1969, when Willy Brandt led a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals into office. The other change of government occurred in 1982, when the liberals switched alliances, transferring their support from the SPD's Helmut Schmidt to the conservative Helmut Kohl. But ever since social democratic hopeful Gerhard Schröder won a landslide victory in the regional elections in Lower Saxony in March this year, the general perception has been that a third change may now be possible. So overwhelming is the feeling, that even Guido Westerwelle, secretary-general of the Liberal Party (FDP), junior partners in Helmut Kohl's coalition, has himself been demanding a "change of politics" -- though in his view, this is something that could be achieved without a change of government. Still, Westerwelle has added to the already considerable confusion within the governing coalition's ranks by calling on Kohl to run and hopefully win the elections -- and then step down and cede his place to "crown prince" Wolfgang Sch�uble, the conservative party's parliamentary leader in the Bundestag. It is not a revolutionary mood that is sweeping the country, but rather a desire for a change in the political climate, towards a more determined, more "modern" leadership. People sense the ruling team is worn out and no longer capable of tackling the most urgent domestic problems. The general feeling is probably best expressed in a phrase Schröder coined for his campaign: "Thank you, Mr Kohl -- but that's enough". Schröder, 54, a man of modest origins who rose to be a lawyer by attending evening classes, knows how to strike this chord to virtuoso effect. His political creed of gathering together all the "economic actors" in a dialogue for reform, is seen as a reasonable approach. Principal business leaders, although publicly siding with Kohl, are known to be ready to cooperate with Schröder -- and Schröder being a social democrat, who has made a point of stressing his attachment to the values of participation and social justice, people believe he might be able to talk the powerful trade unions into the necessary compromises. With less than two months to go before the elections, the opinion polls still give Schröder's SPD a solid lead over its conservative adversaries. And yet, things are still far from clear-cut. The country was shocked when discontent with the incumbent party manifested itself in the regional elections in the East German land of Sachsen-Anhalt in April in the shape of a 12 per cent vote for the far-right Deutsche Volksunion, a party better known for its xenophobic slogans than for any political groundwork. No one is arguing that a swing to the far right or -- horror of unspoken horrors -- Neo-Nazism could be imminent. But it has become obvious that, nine years after the collapse of the communist regime, there remains an unfulfilled need for democratic education in the east. Needless to say, a change of government, an essential part of any democratic routine, would be a helpful gesture in that direction. The question of what coalition could be assembled to rule after the elections is also not an easy one. The Green Party, Schröder's most probable junior partner, is having a hard time getting its campaign on track. Prominent green politicians such as Joschka Fischer, a possible candidate for the Foreign Ministry, are finding it difficult to mend fences with their electorate after several (to put it mildly) confusing statements from the party. Thus a convention in late spring called for raising the price of petrol to five Deutsche marks (approximately $2.80) a litre and objected to the ongoing Nato-peacekeeping operations in Bosnia. Both decisions have since been formally reversed, but other suggestions have followed which seem no less likely to alienate the "new centre" Schröder is building his campaign upon. One cannot avoid the impression that, as the moment comes to engage in the business of government which the Greens have been striving towards for more than a decade, the party's rank and file is somehow running scared, as if afraid of finally losing its political innocence. If the Greens fail to secure enough seats, then the obvious option would be a "grand" coalition of the two major parties -- an alternative that although it would embody the idea of a great national dialogue, would not exactly be a reflection of the present mood for change. Meanwhile, the conservatives seem to have almost thrown in the towel already. Their campaign is lacking both in momentum and in any convincing ideas. Add to this a substantial controversy between Helmut Kohl's CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, which is insisting on the inclusion of the phrase, "Germany is not a country of immigration", in the campaign platform. Given the fact that per capita immigration into Germany is already higher than that of Canada or the US, this claim is about as realistic as advancing that Bavaria enjoys 365 days of uninterrupted sunshine a year. Yet the CDU does now seem ready to negotiate the law on immigration that the opposition has been demanding for years. Such a law, even left-wing Greens agree, should not increase the number of immigrants entering the country, but should rather regulate the flow, facilitate naturalisation and authorise double nationality for so-called "third-generation-immigrants", i.e. German-born children of immigrants who under current legislation are denied automatic citizenship. Foreign policy is not really an issue in this campaign. Although Kohl has been trying to convince people that only someone of his international stature and experience can guarantee a safe transition to a more integrated European Union in which the member states progressively surrender their sovereign rights, Schröder has scored points by playing on his good relations with Britain's Tony Blair and France's Lionel Jospin, two of Germany's key international partners. Indeed, he has even succeeded in persuading Brigitte Souzai, a former aide of late French President François Mitterrand, to join his team. So, will Europe finally enter the new millennium under the flag of socialism? The answer is both yes, and no. It is possible that France, England and Germany will all simultaneously be governed by members of the Socialist International, and there might be a certain amount of harmonisation as a result, particularly in the fields of social policy, employment and immigration, and a more consistent European foreign policy than under current circumstances. But at the same time, there are many persistent differences. Unlike Tony Blair, whose drastic reforms of the Labour Party were achieved more or less from the "outside" -- even to the extent of giving it a new name -- Gerhard Schröder and party President Oskar Lafontaine have made their way from within a party that as early as 1959 performed many of the ideological adjustments which were eventually to turn British Labour into "New Labour". And while their "modernist" approach may be closer to Blair's politics than to Jospin's, German Social Democrats remain deeply attached to many of the traditional values of the working class movement. Moreover, as far as their ecological programme is concerned, including as it does European fiscal reform based on substantial taxes on fossil fuels and an end to the use of nuclear energy, the German opposition parties may well have to look for their allies in neighbouring states such as Holland, Denmark or Austria, rather than among their mighty industrial partners and competitors to the west of the River Rhine. *Reinhard Hesse is a writer on politics and Middle Eastern affairs. He is the co-author of Gerhard Schröder's latest book.
