SUNS  4290 Tuesday 29 September 1998

Bonn, Sep 28 (IPS/Ramesh Jaura) -- The victory of Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) over incumbent Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Sunday's general elections here, could yet result in a government with greater sensitivity to the concerns of developing countries.

Schroeder will be the third social democratic chancellor in post-war Germany.

Preliminary results give the SPD 287 seats in the 656 seat federal parliament (Bundestag) -- 37 more than in the last elections four years ago. The SPD will need a coalition partner, widely expected to be the left-oriented, ecological and anti-nuclear Alliance 90/The Greens, with 47 seats in the Bundestag.

The Bundestag must meet within the next 30 days. By then, the SPD and the Greens will have conducted their first rounds of negotiations for an agreement on a joint government programme until the year 2002 before installing a coalition government.

Green Party leader Juergen Trittin joined the all-party recognition given Kohl for his part in steering Germany to peaceful reunification eight years ago, but added that he was "happy" that he had been
dislodged.

When the new government is in place, development activists within the SPD and developmental NGOs in the country will go to work on pressing for changes in German development aid, now at a record low.

German official development assistance (ODA) in 1997 totalled just 0.28 percent of the country's gross national product (GNP), down from 0.36 percent in 1993. This is well short of the United Nations' 0.7 percent target, though slightly better than the industrialised world's average, now 0.22 percent of GNP.

"That Germany's performance is better than that of the industrial countries as a group on the whole should not distract from the fact that we are still far from achieving the 0.7 percent target," says
Uschi Eid, development policy spokeswoman for the Alliance 90/The Greens in the federal parliament.

The German federal ministry of economic cooperation and development (BMZ) draft budget more or less holds 1999 funding at 7,676 million marks (4,515 million dollars) for bilateral and multilateral
development funds and support for NGOs.

Of this, 3,355 million marks (1,973 million dollars) will be outright aid: 2,205 million marks (1,297 million dollars) will be spent on loans and other 'financial cooperation' and 1,150 million marks (676 million dollars) on technical cooperation -- about the same as 1998.

But Volker Hausmann, secretary general of the NGO Deutsche Welthungerhilfe and vice-president of the Association of German development NGOs (VENRO), says a freeze is not good enough. "Now that the downward trend has been halted, it is necessary to increase ODA to bring it to the level of 0.7% of GNP."

VENRO president Peter Molt says that given the political will, Germany can achieve 0.7 percent. Kohl pledged to do so at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, though six years later Germany has not only failed to hit the target, but actually moved away from it. The old parliament, led by Kohl's CDU, even rejected a resolution for a commitment to reach the target within 'a foreseeable period' -- without even setting a date.

"We have not fulfilled international expectations placed in Germany," admits Ingomar Hauchler, former SPD spokesman on world economy and a key force behind the resolution. Hauchler stepped down Sunday, but the resolution is expected to be resubmitted.

However social democrat sources close to Schroeder hinted that in view of the global financial crunch and the problem of four million jobless in Germany, ODA cannot be raised overnight, a view reportedly accepted by the Greens as well.

Under the present plan the main focus of bilateral and multilateral ODA, according to the German federal ministry of economic cooperation and development (BMZ), is on poverty alleviation, which is allocated 54.9 percent of the budget, or 1,604 million marks (944 million dollars).

But the question that vexes many is not only how much money will be spent on German ODA in 1999, but to whom it will go.

The BMZ has tabled draft plans to double bilateral ODA to the central and eastern European states and the former Soviet republics to 385 million marks (226 million dollars) next year.

To pay for it, ODA to Africa is to be reduced from 856 million marks ($503 million) this year to 715 million marks ($421 million) in 1999. Aid to Asia is also being cut, but that to Latin America will,
increase.

During the election campaign Schroeder focussed on Germany's national economic problems. But his party manifesto adds: "Willy Brandt's vision of a world of democracy and solidarity and a world at peace is the guiding principle for social democratic foreign and security policy."

NGOs are keeping their fingers crossed whether and to what extent the BMZ draft budget will be revised. "We will bring to bear all the weight we can manage with a new members of parliament," says Hausmann, to see that developing lands' concerns are better taken into account.