Getting Down to Work

By George Russell.

Kohl faces old problems and new challenges

"It's business as usual here." So said an aide to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last I week, and in one sense it was. After a smashing election triumph, the newly affirmed leader of Western Europe's richest and most strategic nation was going out of his way to take a relaxed approach to victory. On the day following the election, Kohl's staff conference began, as usual, at 10 a.m. on the second floor of Bonn's low-slung, glass-and-steel chancellery. The Chancellor kept to his daily appointments. The biggest change in staff routine involved the drafting of replies to the congratulatory telegrams and telex messages that had poured into the building after his impressive victory.

Despite his cool attitude, Kohl, 52, had every reason to be ebullient. In an election billed as a watershed in West German history, his Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union alliance had won 48.8% of the popular vote, guaranteeing Kohl 244 seats in the country's 520-member Bundestag. Meanwhile, the Chancellor's coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, led by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, 55, survived a potentially fatal drop in popular esteem to win 6.9% of the vote and 34 Bundestag seats, thereby providing Kohl with a sturdy governing majority. The opposition Social Democratic Party, led by Hans-Jochen Vogel, 57, received only 38.2% and 193 seats, its worst showing since 1961. West Germany's newest political movement, the environmentalist, antinuclear Green Party, rounded out the Bundestag tally by winning 5.6% of the vote and 27 seats. The Greens are the first left-wing opposition group in the country to gain a parliamentary foothold since the Communist Party won 15 Bundestag seats in 1949.

While Kohl's elation was under careful control, a certain exuberance managed to break out in Washington. Within hours of his victory, the Chancellor received telephone congratulations from President Ronald Reagan. The President termed the election result "spectacular." He said that he had never doubted Kohl would win and looked forward to working together "on the economic and security challenges which our nations face." The pair discussed the possibility of having Kohl visit Washington around the time of the May summit meeting of Western industrialized nations in Williamsburg, Va., which both leaders will attend. Most West European leaders were as pleased as Reagan with the West German results.

The burly Chancellor had successfully campaigned on a platform of traditional West German values: hard work, austerity and loyalty to the "fatherland." His job now will be to translate those verities into a painful economic program that Kohl insists will lift the country out of its worst slump since World War II. At the same time, he must thread his way through a political minefield in supporting NATO's 1979 decision to install 572 U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. Unless there is a breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations in Geneva, the installation is to start at the end of this year.

Both tasks will make extraordinary demands on Kohl's resources of tact, patience and ingenuity. The difficulties will rise in direct proportion to shifts in public opinion and to the disruptive problems posed by the Greens, who have vowed to challenge West Germany's political consensus by every means at their disposal.

Kohl intends to re-establish the coalition government that he created nearly six months ago, after the Free Democrats fled their partnership with Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Kohl's first order of business last week was to rebuff Franz Josef Strauss, 67, the brilliant but abrasively ambitious leader of Kohl's Bavarian-based sister party. In a "harmonious" 90-minute meeting at the Christian Democratic headquarters in Bonn, Strauss appeared to expect that the Free Democrats would be shunted aside in the coalition hierarchy and that he, and not Genscher, would be granted the dual posts of Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor in the new government. Kohl's response: Nein.

That internal confrontation was only a prelude to the struggles the Chancellor faces in the months ahead. In a country where economic performance is a vital part of the national identity, Kohl won the election on pocketbook issues. Long accustomed to impressive rates of economic growth, West Germany may see an increase in industrial production of little more than one-quarter of 1% in 1983. Although the country was welcoming migrant workers from Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Portugal only four years ago, some 2.5 million West Germans, or more than 10% of the working population, are now unemployed. The public sector is deeply in the red: the combined federal, state and local budget deficit for 1983 is expected to exceed $31 billion. The antidote that Kohl offered on the campaign trail was a stiff dose of government austerity coupled with incentives to foster free enterprise.

To cure the country's fiscal woes, Kohl has promised a program of cutting business taxes and nibbling away at West Germany's entrenched welfare system. The cost of social programs has grown exponentially, from $15 billion in 1960 to more than $250 billion in 1982. In a near stagnant economy, the problem is becoming worse. In 1981, for example, when 1.27 million West Germans were unemployed, the federal government paid out nearly $6.7 billion in various jobless benefits. Last year the total was around $9.7 billion. Similarly, in 1970 West Germany paid out about $48 billion, or more than 16% of the country's entire output, for health care and pension schemes/In 1980 the total had reached $136 billion, or nearly 22%. Says Herbert Giersch, director of the Institute for World Economics at Kiel and a member of TIME'S European Board of Economists: "The country's social welfare net needs basic structural changes. Public deficits cannot be filled with more government money, but with values like hard work, reasonable wage demands and higher productivity."

Kohl will have to move cautiously to avoid antagonizing the country's powerful and well-organized trade unions, which generally supported the Social Democratic opposition. Friction will arise if the government keeps to a 2% target ceiling on wage hikes for public-sector employees (vs. an inflation rate of 3.7%) and if it pushes through a full-scale reorganization of West Germany's ailing steel industry, involving an unknown number of layoffs.

Those clashes may pale in significance, however, in the tumult that could loom over Kohl's adherence to the NATO missile-deployment decision. The issue could explode well before the newly elected Bundestag begins its first session, perhaps as late as the end of April. Reason: the possible behavior of the Greens, who have threatened to use "all parliamentary and extraparliamentary means available" to block the stationing of the new missiles on West German soil. Says Otto Schily, a West Berlin lawyer and newly elected Bundestag member on the Green ticket: "We believe that the stationing of missiles here is against German law. Therefore we see it as not only our right but our responsibility to carry on the fight against the missiles on every possible level."

In addition to a panoply of sit-ins, teach-ins, demonstrations and hunger strikes against the missile deployment, the Greens intend to pose an even more immediate challenge to Kohl. The group has promised to redefine the role of a West German opposition party to include breaches of government secrecy and other unspecified varieties of parliamentary obstructionism. Says Petra Kelly, one of the Greens' most outspoken leaders: "When you have a Chancellor who is more Reagan than Reagan, somebody has to make clear that Germany doesn't want those rockets."

The Greens have demanded positions on all major Bundestag committees, including those dealing with defense, internal security and finance. At the same time, the party has made it clear that it will leak as it sees fit any confidential documents, including those on NATO nuclear defense installations, that come into its possession. That proposed tactic drew a threat from Bundestag President Richard Stiicklen to bar the Green members from sensitive committees unless they took an oath of confidentiality. The quixotic Greens have also called for a boycott of the 1983 West German national census, on the grounds that the survey constitutes an invasion of privacy.

The disruptive antics of the Greens, if they should occur, are likely to receive their most favorable response in Moscow, where the party's entry into the Bundestag was greeted by the Communist Party daily Pravda as "perhaps the major sensation" of the West German elections. The Soviets are still smarting from Kohl's victory. They had campaigned crudely and openly in favor of Social Democrat Vogel, who was far more ambiguous than Kohl in his approach to the NATO missile deployment, even though the decision to emplace the weapons was taken at the instigation of former Chancellor Schmidt, a Social Democrat. A French foreign affairs analyst speculates that the Soviets may now go so far as to sabotage the Geneva arms limitation talks in order to increase the disruptive pressure on Kohl from the Greens before the missiles are scheduled to arrive.

U.S. State Department officials can also see the potential pressures on Kohl that may result from the Bundestag's new seating arrangement. They recognize that a Kohl victory is not necessarily a blanket endorsement for U.S. missiles in West Germany. Says a senior State Department analyst: "The question is not whether we can deploy. We can deploy, there is no doubt about it now. But the election does not guarantee that we can do so in an orderly way." In other words, the U.S. must still demonstrate flexibility in the Geneva talks and put any onus for failure on the Soviets.

Kohl favors that approach. Despite his strong support for NATO and for the deployment of additional missiles in Western Europe if necessary, the Chancellor also knows that, according to polls taken during the campaign, nearly 60% of his citizens oppose the new weapons. Kohl has obliquely suggested that he hopes for a softening of the current U.S. bargaining position in the Geneva arms talks away from the "zero option," the offer to cancel the NATO deployment if the Soviets dismantle some 340 SS-20 missiles already in place and mostly targeted on Western Europe. Having won his electoral war, West Germany's newly endorsed Chancellor is just as keen on governing in domestic peace.

--By George Russell. Reported by Roland Flamini and John Moody/Bonn

With reporting by Roland Flamini and John Moody/Bonn This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.