Germany's biggest criminals

However, before the current revelations came - quite by accident - to light in early November, the SPD were suffering due to a number of scandals of their own. Admittedly, they were insignificant when compared to the CDU's stories of money laundering and political corruption, but all the same, clear misuses of public money and dodgy sponsorship of politicians' weddings or holidays were made known, an they initially resulted in the resignation of the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony after little more than a year in office. The investigations continue.

The CDU are clearly the major guilty party at the moment. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl led and controlled every aspect of his Party in West Germany (and in the east after unification) for 25 years, up until his election defeat in 1998, when he became honorary party chairman for life. Functionaries and politicians at ever level of the CDU owe their posts to Kohl's personal patronage. He took an extreme interest in every level of his party's operations, but when the former CDU treasurer Walter Kiep told a court on 5 November (he is suspected of tax evasion) that he received one million Deutschmarks in cash, in a suitcase, from an arms dealer, Schreiber, as a donation to the CDU, Kohl denied all knowledge of it.

Schreiber, who is currently avoiding German justice in Canada, later sent a telex, confirming that he had handed over the cash, and that the persons who had given him the money had done so for political reasons. Schreiber went on to declare that he had also had contact with the current CDU General Secretary, Wolfgang Schäuble.

Despite the continual denials, various ex-CDU politicians made their way to the media. Former General Secretary Geissler confirmed at the end of November that his party had a number of secret bank accounts.

At the beginning of December, the Geneva judiciary investigating the privatisation of the GDR petrol-station network Minol and the chemical factory Leuna (both bought by the then state-owned French company Elf Aquitaine) contacted the public prosecutor in the German town of Augsburg. There have been rumours for years that Elf had bribed their way into buying these two major pieces of the East German economy. But, surprise, surprise, the files which should have been kept in the German chancellery, have disappeared!

On 16 December, Kohl admitted in a television interview that between 1993 and 1998 he had received 1.5 to 2 million Marks in illegal donations and admits he made a "big mistake". Kohl refuses to name the donors. On the same day the committee investigating the "party donations and the arms trade" set up by the Bundestag met for the first time.

On 3 January, the public prosecutor in Bonn opened an official investigation into Kohl.

Despite having consistently denied knowing or meeting the arms dealer Schreiber, current CDU General Secretary Schäuble admitted receiving from him 100,000 Marks cash in 1994. He refused to resign, saying he has not contradicted his previous position. This marked the turning point with regard to Kohl - the CDU leadership changed tack and frombnm here on put as much of the blame as possible on their former leader. Leading CDU members advised Kohl to resign from Parliament and from his post of honorary party chairman. Others said he should be expelled.

On 14 January, the CDU ex-leader in the state of Hessen and former Interior Minister, Manfred Kanter, conceded that the CDU Hessen set up a number of secret foreign accounts in 1983 and that basically these were used to launder illegal donations, with hundreds of thousands of marks being taken to Liechtenstein and Switzerland in cases. Previously the CDU said that "foreign Jews" had donated sums.

The SPD and the Greens in Hessen called for new regional elections.

At a Press conference on 18 January in Berlin, the CDU leadership apologised to "our Jewish citizens" and furthermore called for Kohl to name the anonymous donors, or to resign. Later that evening, Kohl resigned from his post as honorary party chair.

Today (20 January) a functionary in charge of petty accounts at the CDU-CSU headquarters committed suicide - "for personal reasons", understandably.

The current revelations focus on the regional CDU in Hessen. Kanther, as Interior Minister in the last Kohl government made himself a name as a man of "law and order" against "criminal foreigner" and mafia life "criminal associations". His laws could now be used against his own party - perhaps Germany's biggest "criminal association" of all.

The most immediate effect of these scandals is that the everyday policies of the SPD-Green government have disappeared from view. Unemployment is up, health cuts are on the way, as is a pension "reform", and the long-planned changes in student grants (to some extent an improvement) have been scrapped.

The scandal will eventually fade and bourgeois politics will continue as usual - though with 70% of the population in eastern Germany and a rising number in the West having no confidence in the current system, who knows for how long?

Matt Heaney