Scandal-hit CDU minister resigns: An east German leader moved house once too often

THE GERMAN Transport Minister, Gunther Krause, resigned yesterday, after a house-move too many at the taxpayer's expense.

Mr Krause had been involved in a series of mini-scandals, which had increasingly irritated and embarrassed his patron, Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The scores are now even: each of the three main parties has lost a senior figure in recent months because of allegations of lies, nepotism and corruption. Mr Krause was forced out after Stern magazine revealed that the taxpayer had paid for a house-move by him in 1991; the pounds 2,500 was officially authorised for payment, and the Transport Ministry had been stoutly defending Mr Krause on the issue, until yesterday.

Yesterday, however, Mr Kohl announced that Mr Krause had asked to resign, and that he 'respects that decision'. Previous embarrassments involving Mr Krause included the revelation that a cleaner employed in the Krause household was partly being paid for out of state funds, and stories about his exploits when allegedly drunk in a restaurant.

After the cleaning-lady saga, Mr Kohl publicly showed Mr Krause the yellow card, saying that he should 'take the experience of recent weeks into consideration'. None the less, Mr Krause's resignation appears to have as much to do with the disillusion and drift at the heart of Bonn politics today as it does with the gravity of the alleged crime.

Mr Krause, who had become highly unpopular with voters for suggesting that drivers should pay to use Germany's motorways, may have been seen as useful ballast, during politically difficult times. He is not the first to go, and will perhaps not be the last.

The economics minister, Jurgen Mollemann, of the Free Democrats, the government's junior coalition partner, was forced out in January, over alleged nepotism. Bjorn Engholm, leader of the Social Democrats, resigned this week over a five-year-old lie regarding his knowledge of a dirty tricks campaign against him.

Mr Krause, representing Mr Kohl's own party, the Christian Democrats, thus completes the hat trick. Possibly next in line is the Bavarian Prime Minister, Max Streibl, from the Christian Democrats' Bavarian sister party, the CSU. Mr Streibl is accused of accepting free flights and hospitality from an aircraft manufacturer.

Embarrassingly for Mr Kohl, the 39-year-old Mr Krause is one of very few east Germans to occupy a senior government position. Given that most in the east already believe that Bonn cares nothing for easterners' interests, Mr Krause's forced resignation is likely only to heighten their widespread sense of alienation.

In east Germany, mass strikes in the steel and engineering industries continued to spread yesterday. The strikes, which began on Monday, are in protest at the refusal by employers to keep to a 1991 deal on bringing eastern wages up to western levels by 1994. The employers say that the economic situation is so bad that it would be impossible to raise wages by 26 per cent; but the support for the strike has been remarkably solid in an increasingly embittered east.

Striking east German metalworkers met employers in Rostock yesterday, but neither side believed a resolution of the four-day dispute would be found in the Baltic coast city.

The strike spread to 70 steel and engineering plants yesterday from 50 a day earlier in economically fragile eastern Germany, IG-Metall said. The union, Germany's largest, threatened to bring more workers off assembly lines and on to picket lines if employers did not improve their offer of a 9 per cent wage rise.

A total of 36,400 union members in three east German states downed tools yesterday, up from about 30,000 on Wednesday. 'We are expanding the industrial action in response to the steel employers' refusal to enter talks with us,' said Horst Wagner, head of IG-Metall's steel negotiating team in Berlin.