Yielding grudgingly to the growing European campaign against smoking in public places, Germany announced on Friday that it would seek to ban smoking in restaurants, discos, schools and other public buildings, but not in pubs, bars or beer tents.
The compromise, worked out by the coalition government, would bring this country, Europe's biggest tobacco market, closer to its neighbors in curtailing public smoking. But it would fall short of recent laws passed by Britain, France, Ireland and Italy, which stamp out cigarettes in pubs and bars as well as other public places.
Anti-smoking groups said the proposal was a milestone, given Germany's long resistance to any restrictions. They called on the parliament to broaden the ban when it votes on it, probably next year.
"Germany has been lagging on this issue for 20 years," said Friedrich Wiebel, president of the German Medical Action Group on Smoking and Health, an anti-smoking organization.
"There is no reason why one group of customers should be protected and others should not," he said.
German officials defended the loopholes, saying the ban had a better chance of passing that way.
"This is a very sustainable compromise," Horst Seehofer, the consumer protection minister, told reporters in Berlin.
Roughly a third of Germans smoke regularly, a proportion comparable to other major Western European countries. But Germany has more young smokers than many of its neighbors. And while the percentage of men who smoke has declined modestly since 1984, smoking has become more popular among women.
One woman who quit years ago is Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel's support for a smoking ban, though carefully modulated, helped turned the tide, according to anti-smoking groups. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag in July, she said: "With bans like these, I always favor a sense of proportion, but I think the demand for a general smoking ban in public buildings is legitimate."
Surveys show that, despite their tolerance of secondhand smoke, a majority of Germans now favor banning it in restaurants. The hurdle, Wiebel said, is the German tobacco industry, which has historically had close ties to the government.
"There are a lot of open questions," said Ingrid Hartges, managing director of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association.
"We need to have a full national debate before any rules come into effect," she said.
Among the other cumbersome details, she said, was a requirement that restaurants that permit smoking have a separate, enclosed room for smokers. That is not practical in many hole-in-the-wall restaurants.
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