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Kohl's Slush Funds: Will Germany's CDU Survive?

© Peter Weber

The scandal over slush funds of the German Christian Democrats has turned into a national crisis of democracy. The scandal started when the public prosecutors discovered evidence of secret accounts in the office of a party counselor. Testimonies involved former chancellor and party chairman Helmut Kohl, who has admitted that he has received about 2 million DM, but refuses to reveal the donors. Later more illegal funds were discovered, leading to first political consequences. By effect of the German party finance law the revelations risk to completely ruin the party of Adenauer, Erhard and Kohl. The crisis could topple even the new party chairman Wolfgang Schäuble, though a plausible successor is not yet in sight. In opinion polls the Christian Democrats have sharply fell. Hence, chancellor Schröder's coalition is strengthened, but the Social Democrats must fear to be involved in the scandal, too.

Kohl's bitter fall

In November Helmut Kohl, Germany's most respected statesman in the world, seemed to be still on top. On the balcony in front of the Brandenburg Gate he embraced his personal friends George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to remember his greatest personal triumph ten years before: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification. One year after his electoral defeat against Gerhard Schröder the "eternal chancellor" seemed to be back in his historical role: Germany's greatest leader since Otto von Bismarck. The Christian Democrat patriarch overshadowed not only the new chancellor Schröder, but even his follower as party leader, Wolfgang Schäuble. Successful in an impressive series of regional elections, Schäuble's CDU had taken revenge for Kohl's defeat and seemed just a small step from returning to power again.

But then history changed again its course, when the German public prosecutors searched the offices of Horst Weyrauch, a tax consultant of Kohl's CDU. Put on the heels of Weyrauch by one Karlheinz Schreiber, a business-man arrested by Canadian police in September and suspected of having paid a one-million-dollars-bribe for the exportation of some 35 tanks to Saudi-Arabia, the German public prosecutors found evidence of strange party accounts. The next to be arrested was the CDU's former treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep who confessed the existence of slush party funds. Both, Leisler Kiep and Weyrauch, declared that party chairman Kohl knew about the illegal transactions, thus starting the biggest crisis in the history of the German CDU.

A question of honor

Kohl first tried to defend himself in his most bullish style, speaking in the Bundestag, but with little success. Put on the cords by the testimonies, he decided to counterattack, asking for an opportunity to address the country on television. On 16th December Kohl admitted that from 1993 to 1998 the CDU had collected about 2 million DM of contributions without declaring them in the party's financial reports. At the same time the chancellor of German unity denied that these payments were bribes received in exchange for a political favor, but he refused to name the donors, since he had given his word of honor to maintain their anonymity.

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