"Major Defeat"

Only seven days earlier, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had endured the strain of President Reagan's controversial visit to a military cemetery at Bitburg with its Nazi graves. Last week the Chancellor faced an ordeal that was, in terms of his political future, more significant. In the most important state election since Kohl's national victory two years ago, voters went to the polls in North Rhine-Westphalia, whose 17 million residents represent more than a quarter of the country's electorate. The result: a stinging setback for the Chancellor.

In the race for the state parliament, Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Union made its poorest showing in 35 years, garnering just 36.5% of the vote. By contrast, the left-of-center Social Democratic Party posted its best performance ever, winning a majority of 52.1%. Every major city in the state except the federal capital of Bonn fell to the Social Democrats, as did more than half the districts formerly held by the Christian Democrats. Kohl called the results a "major defeat." His party, he admitted, lost large numbers from two of its most faithful constituencies: farmers and the elderly.

There were, here and there, a few consolations for the Chancellor. One of his coalition partners, the Free Democratic Party, which only three months ago seemed in danger of becoming extinct, continued its comeback by winning 6% of the votes. The anti-Establishment Greens, meanwhile, dropped to only 4.6%, just short of the 5% minimum required to gain a seat in the state parliament.

Nonetheless the results, coming only two months after the Christian Democrats lost control of the industrial state of Saarland for the first time in 30 years, suggested that Kohl's re-election in 1987 is by no means certain. "In only two years, the party has lost 1.7 million voters," said Kurt Biedenkopf, the Christian Democrats' co-chairman in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although the Chancellor campaigned actively throughout the state, his personal popularity apparently wrought no magic. Reagan's Bitburg visit probably did not harm the Chancellor's cause, but it certainly did not help as much as Kohl had hoped. The defeat also betrayed a widespread impatience that the Chancellor's long-promised economic Wende, or turnaround, has not fully materialized; indeed, in February, national unemployment soared to a postwar high of 10.6%. To make matters worse, Kohl's protege, Bernhard Worms, was trounced in the race for North Rhine-Westphalia state leader by Incumbent Johannes Rau. With his moderate views and good-natured disposition, Rau may eventually displace the lackluster Hans-Jochen Vogel as the Social Democrats' parliamentary leader and mount a formidable challenge for the chancellorship.

On an election-night television show last week, both of the main parties went on the attack. Kohl and Social Democratic Party Leader Willy Brandt, a former Chancellor, broke into a shouting match, with Kohl accusing Brandt of "primitive anti-Americanism" and Brandt calling Kohl "a liar." In the days that followed, the Bundestag crackled with heckling and mudslinging. "This," said Social Democratic Secretary-General Peter Glotz, "is the beginning of the central campaign."