Chancellor's wife steps into air miles row
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s wife today waded into an MPs air miles row, accusing Germany’s most popular newspaper of targeting the government ahead of next month’s general election.
The flap, less than eight weeks before polling day, has resulted in the withdrawal from active politics of Germany’s best-known ex-communist and a prominent member of the Greens party, the junior partner in Schroeder’s governing coalition.
Doris Schroeder-Koepf accused the mass-circulation Bild of ‘‘playing politics’’ and avoiding stories that could hurt her husband’s conservative election rival, Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber.
The newspaper has alleged several politicians have used business air miles for personal trips, and while many have been from Schroeder’s centre-left party or parties aligned with it, Bild has also implicated conservative MPs.
Schroeder-Koepf - who once worked for Bild - said the newspaper’s young editors ‘‘are getting even with their teachers and sometimes with their fathers, who belong to the generation of 1968.’’
Bild’s chief editor said he couldn’t take the accusations seriously.
‘‘If Doris Schroeder-Koepf were still working for Bild, she would have researched accusations against politicians who have profited at taxpayers’ expense in exactly the same way,’’ said Kai Diekmann.
The Chancellor avoided directly criticising Bild.
Still, he said, ‘‘I’m not inclined toward conspiracy theories but a certain one-sidedness is apparent here.’’
Stoiber suggested the whole issue of the use of air miles has been overblown.
‘‘If there were irregularities, then they must be corrected,’’ he said. ‘‘But these relatively small lapses should not divert attention from the serious problems we have.’’
Polls have showed Stoiber’s conservatives slightly ahead of Schroeder’s Social Democrats, whose campaign has been undermined by an economic slowdown that has kept unemployment stubbornly high.
Germany’s parliament forbids personal use of air miles accumulated on business trips, but has no prescribed way of enforcing the rule.
