BONN -- German political commentators are starting to think the unthinkable. Is Chancellor Helmut Kohl, they wonder, losing his political touch?


The media mill began grinding after the veteran chancellor's own party ignored his appeals and rejected quotas he wanted to help women get ahead in politics.


The surprise setback, which soured the end of his Christian Democrats' annual congress Wednesday, has dimmed the aura of unchallenged authority that otherwise enveloped Kohl during the three-day meeting in Karlsruhe.


"The delegates told Kohl: We think you're great, but there are limits," German Radio Berlin commented.


Pundits agreed the chancellor was embarrassed but not immediately threatened by the defeat for his main reform, which was to have reserved one-third of all party posts and candidacies for women.


But the episode highlighted a dilemma facing his CDU, which has the lowest number of women politicians of all parties and is steadily losing support among young women voters.


Why should a conservative party try to keep up with the times when it's far ahead in the polls and its best vote-getter wants to govern into the next century?


"The chancellor failed because he has been so successful," Munich's liberal daily S--ddeutsche Zeitung wrote.


"The party he leads is doing so brilliantly in the polls that it has let itself be blinded. It is vain and smug and sees no need to change."


ARD television said the vote contradicted the image the CDU wanted to give of itself as "Germany's most modern party" and the country's natural leader into the 21st century.


"Kohl was working almost like a feminist trying to get more party positions for women, but the majority of delegates still didn't follow him," it said.


"The CDU is developing an ever better sense for tomorrow's issues and can present them perfectly," it added. "That arouses a need for change but the CDU can't satisfy it."


Kohl, who has been chancellor since 1982 and CDU chairman since 1973, was partly to blame for his own defeat.


He insisted the women's quota should be the last item on the agenda and counted on his personal authority to sway the doubters among the 1,000 delegates, his aides said.


But when it came time to vote, only 821 delegates were still there, the rest having left early for home as happens at every congress like this. In the end, Kohl missed the 501-vote quorum needed to pass the resolution by only five votes.


"It would be nonsense to say Kohl was on the way down after the storm on the last day at the Karlsruhe congress, but the beaming halo Kohl was wearing at the beginning looks a bit duller now," Hessian Radio remarked.


The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Kohl's setback on the women's quota was not as important as his success in getting unquestioned support from the delegates for his goal of a European common currency in 1999.


The delegates on Monday unanimously backed his call for tough criteria for the planned economic and monetary union both before and after European Union members entered it.