Going but Not Gone

Two days before the people of the Saar went to the polls to elect a new Parliament, French newspapers were gloomily telling their readers: "The Saar is lost." After all, only two months before, the German-speaking miners and farmers of the coal-rich Saar basin had seemed to demonstrate their preference for Germany by rejecting (more than two to one) a Franco-German proposal to "Europeanize" them. Yet last week, when the results were in, it was the confident Germans, not the French, who were bitterly disappointed. Pro-German parties won almost two-thirds of the total vote (and 33 out of the 50 seats in Parliament), but they failed by a tidy margin to carry the 75% majority they need to push through a merger of the Saar and West Germany.

Under lackluster Dr. Hubert Ney, 62, the pro-German Christian Democrats (an offshoot of Konrad Adenauer's West German C.D.U.) rolled up 25.4% of the vote. The Social Democrats took a beating (14.3% of the vote), trailing far behind the supernationalist right-wing Democrats (24.2%), under ex-Nazi Heinrich Schneider. The big surprise was that tubby little "Jojo" Hoffmann, the Francophile ex-Premier, cornered a solid 21.8% (and 13 seats in Parliament) for his Christian People's Party. Hoffmann's supporters, who favor continued economic collaboration between the Saar and France, cannily reminded middle-class Saarlanders that West German taxes might make a bigger hole in their pocketbooks than their own French-style system.

France and Germany have squabbled over the Saar since the division of Charle-magnefe empire. France, which would no longer be in the same industrial league as West Germany if the Saar's coal and steel changed hands, concedes that it cannot prevent the Saarlanders from rejoining their kinsmen at some future time, but it insists on a guaranteed share of Saar production, and German nationalists noisily object. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a good European, believes that Franco-German understanding is more important than anything that impedes it, and accordingly will not be trying to hurry the Saar into reunification at the risk of needlessly antagonizing France.

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