Word: chancellor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
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...
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...
...master's thesis attacking the Marshall Plan, Kelly moved in 1972 to Brussels and a job at European Community headquarters that taught her, she says, about women's rights and nuclear arms. That same year, lured by what she called the "utopian hope" of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Kelly joined the Social Democratic Party, only to storm out in 1979 convinced that Brandt's successor, Helmut Schmidt, had betrayed the party's beliefs. Thereafter she joined the Greens, instantly becoming one of the party's brightest spokesmen and strategists...