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German conservatives to name new leader |
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April 11, 2000
ESSEN, Germany, APR 10 (AP) - Clawing back from a slush fund scandal, Germany's opposition conservatives anoint a new leader Monday who has pledged to revive the party after the demise of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and pump up its fighting spirit.
Delegates opening a two-day convention of the Christian Democrats are due to elect Angela Merkel, 45, as the first woman to head a modern German party - and the first native of former communist East Germany to lead one of the old West German parties.
Merkel's rise to the top caps the arrival of a group of untainted leaders who seized their chance after Kohl sent the party into a tailspin and hastened the exit of the old guard with his admission last December that he accepted illegal campaign donations. Merkel, who served in Kohl's Cabinet, broke with her former boss early in the scandal and gained stature by keeping the party together as its general secretary during the crisis. She was running unopposed in Monday's vote by some 1,000 delegates for party chair.
She said Sunday she wants the convention to send a "signal of a new beginning."
"People should notice that the CDU is back," she said.
Kohl, disgraced despite his historic legacy of uniting Germany in 1990, will not be attending the conference in this western industrial city.
He set off the scandal with his admission that he accepted some 2 million marks (dlrs 1 million) in secret donations while chancellor in the 1990s. The affair widened to include millions more in unexplained campaign funding, secret accounts and a parliamentary investigation into whether government decisions during Kohl's 16 years in power may have been bought.
Merkel is due to replace Wolfgang Schaeuble, who abandoned the post after being implicated in the scandal. Even before her confirmation, voter polls show the Christian Democrats regaining ground against the governing Social Democrats and Merkel's popularity surpassing Schroeder's.
Meanwhile, a verbal attack by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the eve of the convention indicated that he senses the Christian Democrats gathering strength after months of paralysis.
Schroeder, who heads the Social Democrats, took aim at the opposition's new leader in parliament, Friedrich Merz, suggesting in a Bild newspaper interview that "he stands close to" far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider.
The charge apparently referred to statements by Merz questioning why Germany joined European Union efforts to isolate Austria diplomatically after Haider's party joined the government there. Thomas Goppel, a senior official in the Christian Democrats' ultraconservative Bavarian sister party, replied in the daily Die Welt by accusing Schroeder of "politically running amok."
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