CHANCELLOR Helmut Kohl may be back, but in a greatly weakened governGermany's October 16 elections have given his Christian Democrat-Free Democrat (CDU-FDP) coalition a majority of less than 10. It is possible it will not be able to survive until the next elections in 1998.
Parliamentary resistance will be stiffened by the increase in the representation of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) from 17 to 29.
While the vote for the Greens stayed steady at about seven per cent, giving them 48 seats, the extreme-right Republicans saw their vote fall to around two percent, far short of that necessary to get them representation in the German parliament, the Bundestag.
The rebuff of the Republicans is a welcome blow to the European far right after its recent successes in elections in Italy, Austria and Belgium.
Decline
The background to the election was economic decline throughout Germany over the past five years, only partially compensated for by a new surge of economic growth this year which has seen unemployment fall by half a million. Economic crisis and government policy has devastated industry in eastern Germany.
Until this year it seemed likely that Kohl would lose these elections and a new government of the Social Democrats (SPD) would take power.
However, Kohl scraped back on the basis of the limited economic recovery, and the lacklustre performance of the SPD, one of the most right-wing social democratic parties in Europe.
From the outset of the election campaign, the SPD heaped vitriolic abuse on the PDS, and made it clear it would not accept PDS support to form a government, even if the parliamentary arithmetic allowed for it.
Although the issue never arose, in effect the SPD was saying that it would rather have a Kohl-led CDU government than an SPD government relying on support or "tolerance" from the PDS!
The increasingly right-wing Green party also joined in the anti-communist witch hunting of the PDS.
Fearful Greens The Greens' stand-offish attitude to the PDS is an attempt to guard their base in western Germany from incursions both from the left and the right. The Greens fear any association whatever with the former east German regime, and think they too would be victims of the witch hunt if they made an alliance with the PDS.
Moreover the Greens fear that if the PDS establishes itself as a real all-German party, it will eat into its support from west German radicals.
The success of the PDS was mainly in eastern Germany. Although not successful in reaching the five per cent national threshold necessary for automatic representation in the Bundestag, the PDS circumvented this rule by winning four seats directly: any party winning three seats outright automatically gets proportional representation.
The PDS did particularly well in East Berlin, in the northwest state of Mecklenberg-Vorpommern and in Thuringia.
The two key themes of their campaign were defence of the rights of workers in eastern Germany, and a new deal for women - the PDS was the only party which made women's Scraping home: old king Kohl rights one of its key campaigning issues.
Observers also said the PDS was helped by the vitriolic campaign against it by the CDU, which characterised it as "red fascists". According to Lothar Bisky of the PDS "this was free advertising for us, it played right into our hands".