The recent German federal election brought the remarkable defeat of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the establishment of the most leftwing parliament and government in the 50-year history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The drag of incumbency—Kohl had spent 16 years in office—does not provide the essential explanation of this smashing defeat: Minister President Ran of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state, has had a 24-year tenure and is likely to succeed Mr. Herzog as the federal president next year.

To be sure, Kohl has been the best German chancellor “the world”—i.e., the United States, United Nations, and NATO—has ever seen. His major devotion was to Europe: originally a typical CDU concept that provided a substitute for the lost Reich, this idea has been perverted in the whole of Europe, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into an expression of the internationalism with which Chancellor Kohl was increasingly associated. For the sake of this “Europe,” Kohl was willing to abandon his country’s own currency in opposition to a clear-cut majority of the German electorate. Kohl’s defeat is the final result of the increasing gulf between his Eurocratic agenda and the interests and conviction of his usual constituents.

Since the opposition parties, including the victorious Social Democrats (SPD), did not oppose the introduction of the euro, one might dispute an explanation that bestows too much importance on the issue of the abolition of the deutschemark. The problem is that the only parties that openly opposed the euro were on the right. Germans are well aware that every right-wing party, if close to meeting the five-percent threshold required for parliamentary representation, is considered by the “international community” as Hitler’s heir apparent. (Although Hitler never regarded himself as a “right-wing” politician, the ideological control agencies of the American occupation forces in Germany, advised by their communist experts, decided otherwise.)

Kohl’s left-centrist regime relegitimized the radical left, subjected rightwing parties to secret-service observation and manipulation, disciplined civil servants with known right-wing convictions, and persecuted those who expressed “wrong thoughts” about immigrants, immigration policy, or the holocaust. A recent French study charged Germany with greater political persecution than in the final period of communist East Germany—yet unlike in the dubious case of the Scientologists, zealous human-rights activists have remained silent. Mindful of the squeeze put on (largely Germanspeaking) Switzerland, many Germans were unwilling to put their economic well-being, already endangered by nearly 30 years of liberal budgetary policy, at risk by voting their real convictions, which would have invited a round of German-bashing in the United States and in those areas that are considered the “world community.”

In contrast to Kohl, the candidate of the SPD, Gerhard Schroder, indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the euro, although it was quite clear that, at this late date, the “international community” would not permit the scrapping of the new currency. Having no other choice due to the international Einbindung (one of Kohl’s favorite terms with respect to Europe, meaning something like “incorporation with fetters”), the Germans, not effectively allowed to vote for the right, decided to punish the man who made the euro “irreversible”: Chancellor Kohl.

German voters were attracted decisively by a very cunning move by challenger Schroder: He hired a German Jew who resides in New York as his cultural affairs manager. Being Jewish, Mr. Michael Naumann was allowed to announce that he opposed the elaborate holocaust memorial that Kohl desired to erect in the center of Berlin. In response. Kohl made the mistake of stating that forsaking that project would be resolutely opposed by the (American) “East Coast,” not usually a constituency for a German politician. The prospect (not at all a pledge) that Schroder’s victory would avert perpetual redemption payments by Germans contributed more than anything else to Kohl’s election defeat, overriding all the objections that would have resulted, under normal circumstances, in a crushing defeat of the challenger.

Kohl’s political legacy appears minor. George Bush, not Kohl, is the father of German unification, and Bush succeeded despite the opposition of European “friends” like France and Britain. Fortunately for Kohl, the dying Soviet Union was not strong enough to demand, as a price for her approval of German unification, German termination of the treaties establishing NATO and the European Union. Had the Soviet Union remained powerful, Germans are not sure which option Kohl would have chosen: German unification or Europe, NATO, and the United States. This uncertainty explains why Kohl will never be regarded as a second Bismarck.

Of this one can be sure: Unless the grim economic truth underlying the budget deficits compels otherwise, Mr. Schroder will disappoint in the very area in which he would like his success to be measured; the economy, especially the reduction of the unemployment rate. To succeed, he would need to implement a Reaganite reform policy—an impossibility in Germany, with its left-wing parliament and with communists, in coalition with Schroder’s SPD, on the way back to power in the state of Western Pomerania and possibly elsewhere. Schroder will be forced by doctrinaire elements of the SPD to pursue an employment policy with the old-guard French Socialists, the very basis of which will be making the euro instrumental for financing the public deficits necessitated by socialist employment policies. The end result may well be a disastrous liberal eurocommunism, for which Kohl’s euro project paved the way.

Schröder’s inescapable failure, however, will not likely lead to a recovery of the defeated GDU. The centrist CDU may be faced, sooner rather than later, with the fate of its Italian sister party (and the previous French version): virtual extinction, because its right-leaning electorate finally got fed up with the left-wing policy of the party leadership. The GDU leadership stigmatized the right, giving its constituents no other choice than to endorse the party leadership’s left-wing agenda. To break free of this political and ideological trap, many German voters cast ballots for the left directly, and not indirectly for a left that pretended to be centrist.

But next time, in the midst of deep economic crisis, Germans could prefer to vote for parties that promise to terminate both the euro and the looming liberal eurocommunism. The GDU will not be a likely candidate for this job — rather, it may disappear with the evil it has created.