All across Germany, east and west, pessimism is suddenly on the decline, an indication that the much-debated “German malaise” may have been just a passing mood, according to independent polls.
Snapshots of the national mood show Germans slowly coming around to believing the economy is improving and job security is on the rise-unexpected good news for Chancellor Helmut Kohl in this election year.
“The German people are now convinced the bad times are over,” said Dieter Vogel, the government’s chief spokesman. “The chancellor is absolutely convinced he will win the election on this issue.”
A senior Kohl political adviser said the government is privately happy Germany was hit by economic crisis last year-but one that has proven manageable by the administration.
“Chancellor Kohl will be reinforcing this idea that he is able to overcome the deepest economic crisis faced by Germany since the war,” said the adviser.
“Ironically, it would not have been that good for the government if we had not had this economic crisis. In that case, the opposition could have said, `It does not matter who governs, since Germany is so stable.’ “
There is much talk this election year about the “Clinton factor”-whether Germans will vote for a fresh face after 12 years of rule by Kohl’s center-right Christian Democratic Union.
One Clinton dictum-“It’s the economy, stupid”-certainly will be the deciding factor Oct. 16 in the vote for the Bundestag, or parliament, which in turn chooses the next chancellor.
Rudolf Scharping, a liberal who is the opposition Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor, says on the campaign trail that Germany’s worst postwar recession was caused by the huge cost of the speedy national reunification that Kohl engineered.
Unemployment topped the critical threshold of 4 million jobless in February, but has dipped a bit since.
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The real unemployment figure is closer to 6 million, however, but the government doesn’t count people in government job-training programs or those with make-work jobs subsidized by welfare agencies.
Scharping once held a commanding lead of 15 points in the opinion polls, but he and Kohl are now about even.
German politicians are fascinated by another set of statistics that give a sense of the improving popular mood: Three independent, respected polling agencies have just released figures indicating the much-bemoaned “malaise” may be just a passing mood.
One key question was how Germans believe the economy will perform in the six months to election day.
In the east, only 29 percent of the people responded in April that the economy will continue its nose dive, compared to a pessimistic 51 percent as recently as November.
In the west, 32 percent now believe the economy remains in a dive, compared to 63 percent who predicted continued decline last autumn.
When asked if they feel hope or fear when contemplating the next 12 months, 54 percent of the easterners expressed hope-up from 46 percent last autumn. Those who express fear for their future have fallen from 23 percent to 16 percent.
In the west, optimism about the future increased from 36 percent in the autumn to 46 percent last month, while pessimists dropped from 31 percent to 22 percent of the population.