The new chancellor’s personal poll ratings remain high. But that’s about the only good news he’s heard lately. The Hesse defeat meant that Schroder’s SPD lost its majority in the upper house of Parliament, which could stymie its attempts to push through controversial legislation. ““They will have to talk to us now when they want to pass a law,’’ exulted Angela Merkel, the general secretary of the Christian Democrats. Last week also brought the unsettling news that unemployment, which had dipped below 11 percent late last year, has climbed back up to 11.5 percent. More ominously, IG Metall, the country’s most powerful union, was threatening to launch a strike to push for hefty wage increases. That, in turn, could doom Schroder’s hopes for negotiating his ““Alliance for Jobs’’ between labor and industry.
So far, Schroder has dealt with adversity by being flexible–to a fault. Last month corporate and European Union opposition forced his government to drop a Green-backed plan to ban the reprocessing of nuclear fuels by the year 2000. After the vote in Hesse–where the Christian Democrats shrugged off accusations that they were fanning antiforeigner sentiment and campaigned hard on the citizenship issue–Schroder indicated he’d reconsider his plan to allow dual citizenship. (He’ll still seek to make citizenship more available to many of Germany’s 7.3 million foreign residents.) The government has also redrafted the tax-reform proposals it offered last fall, seeking to make them more business-friendly.
Schroder blamed the Greens’ radical stands for his government’s poor showing. He took particular aim at his leftist Environment minister, Jurgen Trittin, comparing him unfavorably with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the party’s leading moderate. Trittin angrily responded that such sniping is ““harming the image of the entire coalition.’’ The conservative daily Die Welt contended that the coalition was already so badly fractured that the SPD might dump the Greens and hook up instead with the liberal Free Democrats, the junior partners in ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government. SPD chairman and Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine dismissed the report, but conceded that the government was plagued by ““coordination problems.''
Some people make a harsher diagnosis: a lack of leadership or, indeed, any clear sense of direction. ““The start of this government has been disastrous,’’ says Bonn University political scientist Ludger Kuhnhardt. ““There’s no strategy behind it.’’ For his part, Schroder has admitted to ““certain difficulties at the start,’’ but claims his government’s problems have been vastly overdramatized. ““We weren’t given 100 days,’’ he said, referring to the usual honeymoon period between a new government and the press. ““The massive criticism … set in after five days.’’ True enough. And given the erratic course the chancellor’s steering, it could easily get worse.
