The German chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, defended his 16 years in office yesterday during his first face-to-face confrontation with his challenger, Mr Gerhard Schroder. Speaking during a sixhour Bundestag budget debate that was broadcast live on German television, the chancellor admitted his centre-right government had made mistakes but claimed that Germany was now in a better state than when he came to power in 1982.
"They were 16 good years," he said, calling on voters to give him a record fifth term in office on September 27th.
Mr Schroder would have preferred an American-style television debate but Dr Kohl refused. Although yesterday's debate was ostensibly about Germany's public finances, both the chancellor and his challenger used it to boost their election campaigns.
Dr Kohl devoted almost half of his hour-long speech to foreign affairs, stressing his role as an international statesman and reeling off a list of his achievements in Europe. He avoided personal attacks on Mr Schroder but accused him of lacking solidarity with eastern Germans and of attempting to conceal his party's true intentions from the electorate.
Portraying this month's election as a choice between two starkly divergent ideologies, the chancellor claimed that a victory for the Social Democrats could wreck Germany's economic recovery.
"We need stable policies and no experiments. Risk is not the right policy, security is," he said.
Mr Schroder, who enjoys a lead of between three and five points in opinion polls, said that Dr Kohl's achievements in foreign policy and in the process of German unification were beyond dispute. But he claimed that the chancellor was "lost in his past" and was not fit to lead Germany into the future.
Referring to a dispute within the governing Christian Democrats over how long Dr Kohl should serve if he wins the election, Mr Schroder said there was a tragic quality to the chancellor's shoddy treatment by his coll eagues.
"They realise they cannot win an election with you. At the beginning of this campaign, the Social Democrats used the slogan `Thank you, Helmut, but that's enough.' Your own party seems to have left out the `thank you'," he said.
Dr Kohl came from behind to win four elections and he expressed confidence yesterday that he would confound the pundits again this time. But he has never trailed so badly in opinion polls so late in a campaign.
