Word: kohl
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Although the voting surely was such a milestone, it appeared that Germans felt they had had, at least for a while, enough of history on a grand scale. Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, 60, and his coalition partners took a 19-point lead into the election, seemingly assuring them of victory over Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine. The anticipated margin was large enough to leave Christian Democrats fretting that it might be eroded by a low voter turnout. Said a civil servant in the Rhineland: "It's certainly no Schicksalswahl ((election of destiny...
...year ago, before revolution toppled the Communists in what used to be the German Democratic Republic, so matter-of-fact an assessment would have been unthinkable. Lafontaine, the charismatic Saarland state premier, looked like a strong challenger to Kohl, who was less respected and less popular than his party. Lafontaine, 47, appealed to younger voters as a maverick who ranged wide of the Social Democratic establishment and party orthodoxy. A pacifist, keen on environmental issues and allergic to any invocation of nationalist sentiment, he was touted as the "posthistorical politician." In his campaign, Lafontaine even shunned using the black...
Then he got waylaid by history. After the Wall came down, he advocated a go- slow policy on unification. And when the unity drive picked up steam, he attacked Kohl's claim that it could be financed without straining national resources and raising taxes. What Lafontaine underestimated was the depth of feeling on both sides of the old Iron Curtain in favor of merging the two Germanys -- and with that his strategy backfired. His effectiveness as a campaigner was also undermined by near tragedy: in April a deranged woman plunged a knife into his neck, just missing the carotid artery...
...most pressing task is to determine how to pay for unification. Current projections call for an expenditure of roughly $55 billion annually for the next four years for building infrastructure and providing social support in the eastern part of the country. In the months leading up to the election, Kohl resisted a tax hike, preferring instead to rely on spending cuts, the sale of public assets in western and eastern Germany, and large-scale borrowing. Few expect that the government will be able to follow this tack much longer; loading too great a burden on taxpayers, however, risks feeding internal...
...group of citizen- representatives that briefly shared power with the last Communist government in East Berlin, "was democracy for me." Many easterners are upset too at having to lower their expectations of the changes they thought unification would bring. Said Verena Bernau, an unemployed mother of two: "Kohl made a lot of promises, but in practice there are no results...