Word: kohl
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Only seven days earlier, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had endured the strain of President Reagan's controversial visit to a military cemetery at Bitburg with its Nazi graves. Last week the Chancellor faced an ordeal that was, in terms of his political future, more significant. In the most important state election since Kohl's national victory two years ago, voters went to the polls in North Rhine-Westphalia, whose 17 million residents represent more than a quarter of the country's electorate. The result: a stinging setback for the Chancellor...
...race for the state parliament, Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Union made its poorest showing in 35 years, garnering just 36.5% of the vote. By contrast, the left-of-center Social Democratic Party posted its best performance ever, winning a majority of 52.1%. Every major city in the state except the federal capital of Bonn fell to the Social Democrats, as did more than half the districts formerly held by the Christian Democrats. Kohl called the results a "major defeat." His party, he admitted, lost large numbers from two of its most faithful constituencies: farmers and the elderly...
Shortly before the last formal summit session on Saturday morning, Kohl brought Reagan and Mitterrand together for an unscheduled private talk. The U.S. President could not budge his French colleague, and the final summit communique noted only that "most" participants wanted trade talks in early 1986. In context, that bland wording was an unprecedented admission of lack of unanimity. Mitterrand then appeared at a press conference to proclaim, "I have my responsibilities toward France, toward French farm producers and toward Europe. I am defending a just cause...
...could have important nonmilitary applications. Canada's Mulroney and Japan's Nakasone were politely noncommittal; others were interested, but in some cases skeptical, about just what contributions the U.S. wanted. Said Italy's Craxi: "We don't want to make just the carpets and - the screws for the spaceships." Kohl gave SDI a personal endorsement; though the British government is known to be worried about the strategic implications of SDI, Thatcher indicated a desire to share in the research effort. Said she: "Our inventiveness is excellent." The dissenter was (who else?) Mitterrand. He refused to have anything to do with...
...summits has been to force heads of government, especially the American President, to brief themselves on details of trade, currency and interest-rate problems that they might otherwise neglect and to make an effort to gauge what impact their economic policies have on other countries. West German Chancellor Kohl's predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, in an often quoted reflection on the eight summits he attended, said that "they did not bring about much, but what they avoided was of enormous importance." At every summit, for example, the seven leaders renew what amounts to a ritual vow to uphold free trade...