one would have believed how surefootedly the
chancellor, with Genscher’s help, would overcome
the obstacles of reunification as the decade drew
to its close.
The election for the Bundestag in January
1987 gave the CDU/CSU 223 seats and a 44.3
per cent share of the votes, the FDP coalition
partners secured 46 seats with 9.1 per cent of the
vote and the SPD 186 seats and 37 per cent of
the votes. The Greens advanced spectacularly
with 42 seats and 8.3 per cent of the votes; no
other party secured even 1 per cent of the vote.
Support for extremist parties such as neo-Nazis
was insignificant before unification. In 1989,
West Germany, on the occasion of the fortieth
anniversary of the foundation of the Federal
Republic could feel it was prosperous, mature,
and that democracy was firmly established. They
could look confidently to the future unaware of
the problems that lay ahead.
The years from 1987 to 1990 were dominated
by the question of the two Germanies and their
relationship. It ended surprisingly with their sud-
den reunification (see Chapter 76). Kohl benefit-
ted from the gratitude of the Germans in the east
who helped him to secure a convincing victory
in the general election in December 1990.
The derelict state of the new federal Länderin
the eastern half of Germany, an economy that had
already faltered in its trade with the communist
bloc and then in 1990 was unable to meet
Western competition, a German workforce whose
productivity was low after decades of the com-
munist command economy – all these created far
deeper problems for the Western half of Germany
than was anticipated by the Kohl government.
Kohl had promised to revive the east without
raising taxes. The DDR currency was exchanged,
within certain limits, on a ratio of one to one with
the sound West German mark. To do otherwise,
the Kohl government had feared, would have
stimulated a mass migration to the prosperous
Western Länder. Aid had to be poured in speed-
ily to narrow as quickly as possible the gap
between the standards of living, pay, salaries and
pensions between east and west.
Even so, more than 300,000 Germans moved
from the east to the west in the year after unifi-
cation. The difficulties, the costs and the time
it would take to raise the eastern economy to
Western, free-market standards were badly under-
estimated. Kohl’s forecast during the 1990 elec-
tion campaign of ‘blossoming landscapes’ in the
east by 1994 was soon regarded as unlikely to be
fulfilled. His undertaking that ‘nobody after uni-
fication will be worse off’ was rapidly abandoned.
Despite the billions of Deutsche Marks poured
into the eastern Länderand despite efforts to pri-
vatise state industries, the majority of Germans
living in the east continued to face severe prob-
lems. Material benefits still lay in the future for 3
million workers, one-third of the workforce in the
east, who were unemployed or on special pro-
grammes designed to mask the true extent of
unemployment. Disillusionment and frustration
led to growing support for extremist groups, even
for neo-Nazis. Anger was turned on the hapless
foreign asylum-seekers who had taken advantage
of Germany’s hitherto generous immigration pro-
visions – 190,000 had entered in 1990 and
250,000 in 1991. The fire-bombing of hostels
and violent demonstrations shocked democratic
opinion in Germany and the West, but unem-
ployed eastern Germans continued to resent the
help given to foreigners, which they claimed
deprived ‘fellow Germans’ of their due. After half
a century of brown and red dictatorships, this was
evidence of a distinct deficit in ethical values.
The number of foreign immigrants was actu-
ally less than the number of ethnic Germans
who had lived for generations in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe and had now migrated to
Germany. They had been encouraged in quite
1
THE GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLIC 839
Bundestag elections, December 1990
% Seats
CDU/CSU 43.8 319
SPD 33.5 239
FDP 11.0 79
PDS 2.4 17
Greens 1.2 8
(The PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) was the renamed
Communist Party of the former DDR. The Greens (West)
gained no seats, and the extremist Republican Party, which
polled 2.1 per cent of the vote, gained no seats either.)
