"Only one person promised blos-soming landscapes," says Peer Steinbrueck. Looking proudly at Germany's booming economy, falling unemployment and bulging state coffers, the finance minister is trying to deflect objections that the five states of former East Germany have never enjoyed Helmut Kohl's 1990 pledge of economic nirvana. It takes a generation to help the new states to their feet, he says. Mr Steinbruck has no plan to change the "solidarity pact", under which western Germany will subsidise eastern Germany until 2019.
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