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Comrade of the bankers starts work

Imre Karacs
Friday 12 March 1999 19:02 EST
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AFTER THE finance minister ditched because he could not get his taxes to work comes the tax man. Hans Eichel, 57, entrusted with unscrambling Oskar Lafontaine's legacy, may be somewhat challenged in the charisma department but he knows a lot about taxes.

Mr Eichel, Prime Minister of Hesse, has for the past year been the Social Democrats' finance policy co-ordinator in parliament's upper chamber, the Bundesrat. Before that he was one of the party's chief advisers in last year's talks with the then governing Christian Democrats. Opposition and government had tried in vain to work out a common tax reform.

Now he gets the chance to do it alone, and the business world is delighted. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is mocked by traditionalist Social Democrats as the "Comrade of the Bosses". Mr Eichel, whose fiefdom in Hesse runs through Frankfurt, is nicknamed the "Comrade of the Bankers".

But he is not without leftist credentials. A keen participant of student protests in the Sixties, he started his Social Democrat career as a left- winger.Kassel, his home town, was declared nuclear-free during his stint as mayor. Hesse, which he has governed since 1991, is reputed to be the best-run Social Democrat region.

Like Mr Schroder, Mr Eichel works hard to keep business happy and lobbies energetically for new investment. He intervened to ensure that Opel, one of the region's biggest employers, injects new capital into its Hesse plants.

Mr Eichel is serving his last month as Hesse Prime Minister after losing the regional elections last month. His defeat owed little to his record and more to the campaign by his Christian Democratic opponents against plans by the Bonn government to extend German citizenship to long-term foreign residents.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr Eichel holds no strong views on tax harmonisation, currency speculators or European interest rates. He is a strong fan of the euro, and a supporter of the European Central Bank, which is based in Frankfurt.

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