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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, flailing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder takes lessons in political survival from President Clinton.
Oct 29, 1999 | Times are so tough lately for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, dragged down by discord in his own Social Democratic party, regular drubbings in regional elections and a still-sluggish German economy, it's tempting to predict his government will fall sometime soon. But that won't happen.
In his one year in office, Schroeder has learned valuable lessons in political survival from that ultimate survivor, Bill Clinton, and even last weekend's most recent regional setback could in fact be seen as good news. The rival Christian Democrats won 41.6 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a gain of 10 percentage points over 1994. But the SPD dropped less than two percentage points, less than expected, as in recent elections in Berlin, giving Schroeder a break in the expectations game, which is of course the game that matters most.
Schroeder must have moments where he wishes he was his old, inevitable predecessor, Helmut Kohl, accepted by the German people as a fact of life, if never a universally admired one. Recent polls show 40 percent of Germans would like to have Kohl as chancellor right now, compared to 38 percent for Schroeder. But while he may harbor private fantasies of breaking Kohl's record of 16 years in Germany's highest office, he would never envy Kohl's public persona. For one thing, Schroeder could never endure being as fat as Kohl. Schroeder hankers after looking good almost as much as he craves power. This isn't just vanity. It's also proof of how much he has been shaped as a leader by studying Clinton's style.
For years, Schroeder has gone to sleep at night comparing himself to Clinton, and in more ways than the obvious: Schroeder and the third of his four wives were known as the Clintons of Lower Saxony, and by most accounts, loved the comparison. Schroeder's third wife was "Hillu," and the similarity to "Hillary" was often noted with a kind of desperate pride. That marriage didn't work out because Schroeder believed he could never be chancellor with Hillu as his wife, given her knack for public gaffes -- one obvious contrast with Clinton. Another comes in the area of consequences. If Schroeder were an American politician dipping in the polls the way he has of late, some sort of scandal related to the sack would long since have presented itself and driven him from office. But this is not America, and Schroeder will have to do much more than astonish visiting U.S. journalists with his ham-handed flirting with their news assistants if he is ever to pay any political price for his reputation as a sort of schlumpy Lothario, an image that opens him up to all sorts of ridicule in the press.
"Kohl was a very good chancellor, especially for satirists and humorists, because he was very charming, very powerful and also very fat," said Oliver Maria Schmitt, editor-in-chief of Germany's popular satiric magazine Titanic. "But we had no problem when Schroeder came to power. We showed him as a more sexually successful man than Kohl. He's now married his fourth time, and Helmut Kohl is still married to his old housewife. We see Schroeder as a representative of this new, eager type of politician ... [with] absolutely no moral aims or values. They just like power. I think this is a reason why Schroeder is a very good friend with (Tony) Blair and adores Mr. Clinton, not only because of being in power but also because of his legendary cigar tricks."
Schroeder became ludicrous before he could become despised. His Brioni suits and enthusiasm for women have defined his time in office so far almost as much as his political wishy-washiness and the bitter pill of economic self-control he seems serious about selling to the German people. His knack for self-caricature was as important a reason for his troubled early months in office as his ideas or his support of the war in Kosovo. But it's unlikely any of this will matter much. Unless Schroeder panics (as he has admittedly shown signs of doing in recent weeks), he will get enough time in office to see if the German economy can rebound, and his public support along with it.
That's in part because of what experts on Germany see as a cautious national mindset. "Germans don't change horses in midstream," said Jackson Janes, executive director of the Washington-based American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. "They threw out the government last year, and that was a first. That would lead me to think Schroeder has until about a year from now where he can say that the reforms took, maybe a dip in unemployment or some movement in the economy."
Post-Kohl Germany needed a transitional figure to move it beyond the old chancellor's country-doctor prescription of two aspirin and a big plate of wurst to anyone feeling the ache of Germany's economic reunification. Schroeder is more like a Fuller Brush salesman, hopping on some new scheme and talking it up like he expects you to buy his rap just because he's putting a lot into it. The problem is, this sort of approach works better in America, where voters' memories are short. Germans are used to putting things in a larger context, and they know just what Schroeder is doing when he leans left -- like he recently did by speaking in favor of a law establishing an early retirement age of 60 and a new tax on the wealthy -- and then leaning right, as he reiterated his determination to freeze pension benefits next year as part of a plan to trim more than $16 billion in federal spending on social programs.
Even though Schroeder comes from an authentic working-class background, his efforts to campaign on behalf of SPD candidates in the recent regional elections did not go over well. He's seen as a yuppie now, and union members and others in the SPD's classic left constituency view his belt-tightening measures as a form of betrayal. When Schroeder first took office, he made a lot of noise about being a traditional Social Democrat. He insisted he could solve Germany's economic problems without having to mess with the old equation of heavy social spending to pay for such services as national health care, taken for granted here. But when prominent party member Oskar LaFontaine bolted the government, Schroeder set about redefining himself as a Tony Blair-style liberal by making economic viability a top priority.
Most political analysts here see this middle course as Schroeder's only hope to make something of his chancellorship, given the difficulty of actually making the sort of compromises required to govern while keeping a left-wing constituency happy. But by holding firm, Schroeder risks alienating his own party.
