PARIS European newspapers sounded the political death knell Monday for chancellor helmut kohl, following the far-right's strong showing in a state election in eastern Germany. While the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) won Sunday's parliamentary election in Saxony-Anhalt, the real shock for Kohl was an extreme-right party winning representation for the first time in a state legislature. With its clear signal that frustration over record unemployment is feeding radicalism in the formerly communist east, the result was a new setback for the chancellor's bid for reelection in September. Hohl has pitched himself as the architect of German reunification and a costly government policy to turn Eastern Germany into what he had promised would be a flowering landscape.

With five months to go until elections, these results show that voters in the east, disillusioned by the broken promises of reunification, could bring about Kohl's downfall, said France's leftist daily, Liberation. The parisian economic daily La Tribune said Kohl had been seen as a lame-duck chancellor for some time, and that the Saxony-Anhalt election had finally delivered the coup de grace to his reelection ambitions.

The SPD won 35.7 percent of the vote Sunday, while Kohl's Christian Democratic Union CDU took only 22.1 percent of the vote way down on the 34.4 percent it had won in 1994. (AFP)