by Dr. Stanley Kalpage
Today German voters will decide who will usher Europe's economically most powerful nation into the next millennium. Chancellor Helmut Kohl (68) is making an unprecedented bid for a fifth successive term in office and is battling for the prize, a few percentage points behind a telegenic and much younger opponent. Gerhard Schroeder (54) Since the election campaign began some four months ago. Schroeder has led in the public opinion polls but Kohl has been steadily catching up and, on the eve of the election, the result is too close to predict.

One week before the polls, a survey put Schroeder's Social Democrats on 41 percent with 38 percent for Kohl's Christian Demo-cratic Union Kohl's coalition partner, the right wing Christian Socialist Union, and the left-inclined Greens party, which is likely to link up with Schroeder, were each placed at around 5 percent. Nearly 25 percent of the voters were still said to be undecided.

Electoral system
The German chancellor is not elected directly by the voters. After the 27 September elections the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, votes to elect the chancellor by a simple majority.

Each of the 60.5 million eligible voters in the Bundestag elections gets two votes. The electoral system is a combination of proportional representation and the first-the-post plurality system. One of the votes is to elect a constituency representative and the second to select a candidate from an election district party list. In order to gain any seats in the Bundestag a party must win at least five per cent of the vote-or else three districts directly.

The ruling group consisting of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) is one of the most powerful coalitions to emerge in Germany's post-war period Generally conservative on economic and social policy, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, are often identified with the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, although their programs tend to be more pragmatic than ideological.

The two coalition partners, while maintaining separate organisational structures, form a common caucus in the Bundestag and run co-ordinated campaigns. In the 1994 elections, the CDU and the CSU together earned 41 5 percent of the vote and won 294 seats making it the country's largest party/coalition. In recent years, popular support for the party has eroded, particularly in eastern Germany where unemployment is particularly acute, and CDU promises of prosperity have gone mostly unfulfilled.

Kohl's strengths and weaknesses
Kohl was first elected chancellor in 1982 on a platform that promised to bolster private enterprise and curtail the role of the state after what he called ''13 years of socialistic misrule'' under his predecessors. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. But after 16 years of Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic-led government, the state's role in the economy has not been reduced. It is now to stand at 48 percent of the gross national product.

Chancellor of Germany since 1982, Kohl is best-known for his ardent backing of European unity, pushing hard for Germany's inclusion in the euro-the European Union's common currency. After the collapse of East Germany in 1987, Kohl rallied support for rapid unification and won the chancellorship for the third successive time in the first, post-war all-German elections in 1990.

Popular support for Kohl and his Christian Democratic Union (CDU), however, has suffered recently in the East and elsewhere. High unemployment and lingering difficulties in modernising the East German economy have put Kohl's party behind the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and its candidate, Gerhard Schroeder, in the polls for the September 1998 elections.

SDP and Gerhard Schroeder
The second largest party in Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) historically advocated Marxist principles and is one of the oldest organised political parties in the world. But it abandoned Marxism in 1959 in favour of stressing social welfare programs Supporters gave the SDP 36.4 percent of the vote and 252 seats in the Bundestag in the 1994 election.

In the 1998 election, the SDP has positioned itself as the ''centrist'' party, emphasising the knee to reach out to new constituencies and expand the party's reach to young entrepreneurs. Like Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign against George Bush, the Social Democrats hope to take advantage of Kohl's long term in office and of voter dissatisfaction with the stalled economy under the Christian Democrats.

Schroeder's policies
Although Gerhard Schroeder boasts that he has jettisoned his Marxist past and embraced the political mainstream as a friend of big business, his economic program would roll back Kohl's timid reforms, including small cuts in pension payments and sick pay. A Schroeder-led government would raise family allowances and double spending on education, which Schroeder would finance with extra taxes on the rich and on energy consumption.

Schroeder is often compared to president Bill Clinton an effective orator with a reputation for swimming with the prevailing political currents. In 1980, as a self-described Marxist, Schroeder won a seat in the Bundestag and later campaigned actively against NATO plans to deploy missiles in then-West Germany.

Years later, Schroeder reinvented himself as a moderate, winning the premiership of Lower Saxony in 1990. Currently, he maintains close ties with big business and often speaks of the need for Germany to expand its industrial economy into sectors like bio-technology and computer software. In the 1998 campaign, Schroeder has shrewdly focused the debate on the economy and Germany's high unemployment, suggesting that the time has come for the ''exhausted'' Chancellor Kohl to be voted out of office.

Foreign affairs
Schroeder has pledged continuity in foreign policy. At the same time, a Social Democratic Party victory would place Germany ideologically with the recently-elected centre left governments in Britain, France and Italy's

In a recent visit to the US Schroeder assured the Americans that there will be no major foreign policy changes if he is elected. He told reporters during a visit to Washington that the German election is being fought on domestic issues, primarily on how to boost the economy and put Germany's 4.4 million unemployed back to work. ''There is hardly any difference at all on foreign policy,'' he said.

Schroeder agrees that the time has come for the US to increasingly engage China in a dialogue and more intensive co-operation.

The German elections come at a particularly sensitive time in Europe. In January, Germany takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union-while the joint currency, the euro, is to officially enter into circulation.

Talks with candidates aspiring for EU-membership will soon advance to a decisive stage, while NATO continues plans for expansion eastward to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. German relations with Turkey have been strained since that country was omitted from a list of potential new members of the European Union. Schroeder has said that this was unnecessary and that he would make special efforts to normalise relations with Turkey.

Schroeder defends Kohl's policy of pumping money into Russia-a measure that many European bankers and experts see as a grave risk to the European economy. ''We have a vital interest in a successful Russian transformation process,'' says Schroeder. Total credits and outright gifts to Russia by Germany since the collapse of the Soviet Union are estimated at $67 billion.

A forthcoming domestic event of significance concerns Germany's plans to move its capital from Bonn to Berlin, placing it virtually in the heart of an expanded union.

Trends and forecasts
Opinion polls give the centre-left Social democrats an edge over he conservative rightist Christian Democrats, who have been closing in on the run up to Sunday's general election.

Voting in the east will probably decide Kohl's fate. In fact, most polls show Kohl will win only 28 percent of the vote in the East, down from 39 percent in 1994 and 42 percent in the 1990 election, which came just three months after unification.

In this determined fight to win a fifth four-year term, Kohl is reminding hostile crowds in the East that they must thank him for their strong deutschemarks and the world's most modern telephone network. But voters want jobs and a future, not a lesson in history. Kohl's favourable ratings in the east have now plunged to 18 percent, and pollsters warn that his waning support from Eastern voters may cost him the election.

A grand coalition
A close split in votes for Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats and Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Demo-crats could give Germany something it hasn't seen since 1969-a Grand Coalition-in which the two major parties govern jointly.

In such an eventuality, the job of chancellor would go to the party with the most votes. Even if Christian democrats come out on top, Kohl says he would never lead in conjunction with the opposition. In that situation, his protege, 56-year-old Wolfgang Schaeuble, would likely step in taking what some people-even members of Kohl's party-think is Schaeuble's rightful spot in a new generation of conservative leadership. But one must not forget that Kohl has changed his mind before, as in the previous 1994 election. He said that would be his last.