THERE was a touch of deja vu in the air in Bonn on Wednesday when Germany's finance minister, Theo Waigel, stood before a hostile Bundestag and listened to tirades of condemnation and calls for his resignation. During his eight years in office, opposition demands that he should be sacked have become something of a ritual.
"I've been hearing this since my first year in office. But I'm still here," he said last weekend as he became Germany's longest-serving post-war finance minister The opposition's indictment against Mr Waigel is a long and serious one. He is accused of mismanaging the German economy so badly that he has transformed Europe's powerhouse economy into a basket case with the highest jobless figure since Hitler came to power in 1933. He has lurched from one budget crisis to the next, stretching Germany's ruling centre-right coalition almost to breaking point in his attempts to patch over gaping holes in his annual estimates.
But the row between Bonn and the Bundestag over Mr Waigel's plan to qualify for entry to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by revaluing the bank's gold reserves is the gravest crisis yet to hit the beleaguered finance minister. The scheme, which was widely viewed as an exercise in creative accounting may have dealt a fatal blow to Germany's cherished reputation for financial probity. But after this week's climbdown by the government, Mr Waigel will no longer be able to use profits from the revaluation to reduce this year's budget deficit, leaving him with no gain whatsoever from all the havoc wrought by the controversy.
Yet when Dr Helmut Kohl rose to speak during Wednesday's debate, he threw his full weight behind the finance minister, praising his efforts to keep the country's finances in order. "He is and remains my finance minister," the chancellor declared.
A good finance minister, Mr Waigel likes to say, ought to be unpopular. On that basis, he is well on the way to becoming the best finance minister Germany has ever had. But the jovial Bavarian, whose black bushy eyebrows have made him a favourite target for cartoonists, is not entirely to blame for Germany's financial troubles. When he came to office in 1989, a succession of boom years had left Bonn's finances in excellent shape with public debt at its lowest level for 15 year's. Then, a year later, came German reunification.
I'm happy about reunification, but if it hadn't happened, I'd probably have been the most successful finance minister in history," Mr Waigel said in 1995.
Bonn suddenly had to pay off the debts incurred by the former East Germany, as well as financing the economic regeneration of the east and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from German soil. The Bundesbank calculates that the cost of reunification accounts for approximately half of Germany's DM2000 billion (£709.6 billion) mountain of debt.
It is to Mr Waigel's credit that, despite these Herculean tasks and the deep recession that started in 1993, the mark has not suffered and inflation has not exploded. But his critics complain that. in common with Dr Kohl, the finance minister has no real grasp of economics and that his instincts are too narrowly political.
As leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), Mr Waigel has good reason to keep his political antennae honed. He faces a determined rival within the small, fiercely conservative party in the shape of Bavaria's prime minister, Edmund Stoiber.
The Eurosceptic Mr Stoiber does little to conceal his ambition to leapfrog Mr Waigel in the race to succeed Dr Kohl and to become the first CSU chancellor.
Within the ruling centre-right coalition, the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) are a permanent thorn in Mr Waigel's side. This tiny party, which has abandoned most of its social liberalism, campaigns on a neo-conservative platform of tax cuts and sweeping privatisation. Each time the finance minister proposes a tax rise to reduce the budget deficit, the FDP threatens to walk out of the government, depriving Dr Kohl of his slim Bundestag majority.
Mr Waigel is currently wrangling with the FDP over how to plug a DM15 billion gap in next year's budget. Before that. he needs to find more than DM10 billion to bring this year's deficit below the 3 per cent target set out in the Maastricht Treaty for entry to EMU.
Most of the betting in Bonn is on Germany and France failing to meet the criteria, but pushing ahead to monetary union in 1999 regardless. Germany hope that the stability pact hammered out at the Dublin summit will be enough to maintain order within EMU and to preserve the strength of the euro.
If it all goes wrong, the hapless but thick-skinned Mr Waigel, who once described himself as "the whipping boy of the nation", will probably be wheeled out as usual to take the blame.
