Helmut Kohl marked his 5,145th day as chancellor of Germany on Thursday, officially surpassing Konrad Adenauer as the longest-serving chancellor this century.
At 6 foot 4 and close to 300 pounds, the 66-year-old Kohl has towered over Germany since he ousted Helmut Schmidt as chancellor in 1982, dominating not only his Christian Democratic Union but political life in this nation of 81 million.Long derided by the German media and intellectuals as a bumbling provincial politician with no charisma and no vision, Kohl has emerged as a leader of historic proportions, the man who personally oversaw the reunification of Germany and has been a major force in keeping Europe on track toward greater integration.
A public-opinion survey in Germany last week ranked Kohl sixth in a list of the most important statesmen of the century, behind John F. Kennedy and Adenauer but ahead of Churchill and Gandhi.
And this for a politician who has had to brave a series of biting epithets based mainly on his imposing bulk - "Burger King," the "Black Giant," the "Monument," the "Pear," the "Godfather" or on his proclivity to put off decisions - the "Fencesitter."
Kohl has made a career of being underestimated by his opponents, both within and outside his party.
"He will never become chancellor," was the blunt assessment of Kohl's prospects by the late Franz Josef Strauss, who led the sister Christian Social Union in Bavaria. "He is totally incapable. He lacks the basic elements of character, intelligence and politics. He lacks everything for this office."
But Strauss failed in his attempt to be elected chancellor in 1980, while Kohl has become what the news-magazine Der Spiegel called in a recent cover story "the Eternal Chancellor."
Despite a soft economy and unpopular spending cuts, Kohl faces no immediate threat. Although currently down in the polls, he doesn't actually have to face the voters again until 1998, and the opposition remains unconvincing. If Kohl wins then, he'll have a chance at the record set by Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" who held power for 19 years at the end of the last century.
At the Christian Democratic convention in Hanover last week, Kohl's hold on the party he has led since 1973 was unquestioned. He attracted a 95.5-percent vote when it was time to choose him for yet another two-year term as party leader.
"Brezhnev couldn't have done very much better," one Western diplomat said.
Although Kohl has overseen momentous events in his country's recent history, it's his very ordinariness that's the secret to his success. Not a man beloved by the public, he is above all trusted as someone who personifies their values.
"He represents the normal German bourgeois and petit bourgeois," said Juergen Hoffmann, a political scientist at the Hamburg School for Economy and Politics. "His popularity is not the reason for his success. The main reason for his success is that he is the defender of the status quo and the people don't want to change the status quo."
Kohl has repeatedly beaten the odds, winning elections that seemed unwinnable for his Christian Democrats only weeks before.
"Four times, in 1983, in 1987, in 1990 and in 1994, it seemed perfectly clear that Kohl's opponent would win and during the campaign he overtook them," said Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, director of the Allensbach Institute, a leading German public-opinion firm.
Noelle-Neumann says Kohl's longevity is based on the fact that voters see him as quintessentially German.
When Allensbach last asked Germans who was the politician who was most "typically German," Kohl won overwhelmingly, with a score of 61 percent. Finance Minister Theo Wagel was a distant second at 37 percent. Oskar Lafontaine, the articulate but largely ineffective Social Democratic leader, scored only 17 percent.
"Journalists are not interested in Kohl because he is like Adenauer. He has an extremely quick mind, but he is not brilliant," Noelle-Neumann said. "It isn't interesting to quote him because the words are simple. But he has an extremely strong idea of where to go and how to get there."
Kohl is also no right-wing ideologue. "We are the party of the social market," he told his party convention, reaffirming his thus-far-unsuccessful battle against German unemployment. Later, Kohl told industrialists they shouldn't simply be guided by the number of jobs they cut because downsizing ignores Germany's greatest capital - its people.
Germans don't seem to mind that their chancellor is not about to make his own fitness video. Every year, he visits an Austrian spa where he tries to lose a few pounds, but before long he's bigger than ever.
And he hasn't let a weight problem stop him from trumpeting his love of heavy German cooking. World political leaders have been taken to Kohl's favorite restaurant, Deidesheimer Hof, to sample Kohl's first choice in cuisine - "saumagen," a southern German version of haggis made with a stuffed pig's stomach.
While Kohl exudes a sense that is far from worldly, speaking only German and going home every weekend to his home constituency of Oggersheim, he has kept Germany an outward-looking nation. European unity has been a central theme of his chancellorship, and he cultivated a particularly close relationship with the late French president Franois Mitterrand.
As for Kohl's prospects for 1998, Hoffmann says the chancellor risks losing the support of working people, who are hit hard by the poor job market, and of former East Germans angry that the promised affluence of reunification has been a long time coming.
Yet Hoffmann, who disagrees with Kohl's politics, doesn't underestimate his abilities. "I think he is a real statesman. He is a great man, although his power derives from the fact he is an ordinary man."