Posted on 07/18/2002 2:36:17 PM PDT by knighthawk
BERLIN (AP) — Ten weeks before national elections, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder fired his defense minister Thursday following reports he took $72,000 in royalties from a public relations adviser.
In a terse statement, Schroeder said that ``there is no longer a basis for working together in government'' with Rudolf Scharping, who held the job since Schroeder won office in 1998.
``I will ask the federal president to dismiss Rudolf Scharping from his functions as defense minister,'' Schroeder said.
Schroeder is in a tough re-election campaign against conservative Bavarian Gov. Edmund Stoiber who said Scharping's ouster showed the weakness of the Social Democrat-led government.
``This is an important day for Germany, which hopefully will make our citizens see how weak the government is and make them draw the appropriate conclusions,'' Stoiber said.
Scharping, 54, is the eighth minister to leave the Schroeder government since he took office. Before the defense minister, the last to go were the health and agriculture ministers, who resigned in January 2001 over the government's botched handling of Germany's mad cow disease outbreak.
Schroeder said Peter Struck, the Social Democrats' leader in parliament, would replace Scharping. The government said a planned visit to Germany Friday by British Prime Minister Tony Blair was postponed.
The ouster came just days after the replacement of Ron Sommer as chief executive of Deutsche Telekom, the German phone giant where the government holds a 43 percent stake.
Schroeder's support for Sommer chilled after the company's share price slump became an election issue.
Scharping, 54, has been at the center of a series of embarrassments for Schroeder's government over the past year.
Scharping has been at the center of a series of gaffes that have embarrassed Schroeder over the past year. His was swiftly ousted after allegations about the payments from the public relations firm appeared the newsmagazine Stern Wednesday.
The minister conceded in an interview with the Bild daily that he had received payments totaling $72,100 for his memoirs and for speeches sponsored by the public relations agency represented by Moritz Hunzinger.
But Scharping insisted he properly reported the payments to tax authorities and said they were related to deals concluded before he became a minister in 1998.
German ministers are not allowed to receive any payments other than their ministerial salary.
Scharping defeated Schroeder for the Social Democratic leadership in 1993 and unsuccessfully challenged Helmut Kohl for the chancellorship a year later. He was replaced as leader in 1995 by Oskar Lafontaine, who later briefly served as Schroeder's finance minister.
Last summer, Scharping came under fire for magazine photos that showed him and his girlfriend splashing in a pool on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca just as German troops prepared to head to Macedonia.
Then came revelations he used an air force plane to return overnight to Mallorca at taxpayers' expense between two official engagements. The scandal was forgotten after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
This year, the opposition tried to unseat Scharping over allegations that he broke budget laws by concerning the purchase of A400M Airbus military transports.
The government rejected the charges, saying it followed proper budget procedure.
Then we can start working on the US!
Repulsive, aren't they? Another "fun" site is BartCop, a major puker.
Still, there is always hope.
But I have hope. The Germans are serious and serious minded people. They have seen that the SPD had no answer and I firmly believe most of those present will never vote SPD again- ever. Once they get a more conservative gov't reinstalled in Germany, you will hear a different tune out of all of Europe. Germany is like their New York, California and Texas combined. What they say really matters. The future is looking up. Now the USA simply has to do its part and take back the Congress, allowing Bush to advance a conservative agenda.
That just happened in the Netherlands too, so why not in Germany? (Yes, I confess we Dutch do not differ so much from Germans).
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