Red Meets Black

It was a milestone of sorts. Into an austere caucus chamber in Bonn's Bundestag last week filed a delegation of Christian Democrats followed by a deputation from the opposition Social Democrat Party. With West Germany's political crisis entering its fourth week, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the Christian Democrats' candidate for Chancellor, met with Socialist Leader Willy Brandt to discuss something that had never been tried before in the postwar period: a "grand coalition" between the red and the black.

Also active in tentative negotiations were Erich Mende's Free Democrats, who hold a slender balance of power between the two big parties in the Bundestag. It was they who precipitated the current crisis by quitting Ludwig Erhard's Cabinet over budget problems. Now they were talking separately to the Socialists and to their former CDU partners about the prospect of forming a "mini-coalition."

The experts could only guess at which parties would ultimately succeed in forming a new government. Some clues could be expected in how well the three parties fared in this week's Bavarian state elections. Whatever the final outcome, it seemed likely that West Germany's next government would rudely revise most of Bonn's most holy foreign policy tenets. For years, Bonn has stood unbendingly for no official contact with East Germany, no diplomatic relations with any country that recognized East Germany, no detente with the Soviet bloc, until after Germany achieved reunification. As a price for participating in any coalition, the Socialists last week issued a set of demands, including the establishment of diplomatic relations with East bloc nations, all-out efforts for a detente with the Soviet Union with no prior conditions, and immediate economic grants to East Germany in order to try and ease the dreary have-not plight of that area's 17 million inhabitants. Says Brandt: "We should not be hypnotized by legalistic formulas."

Next day the Free Democrats came out with a foreign policy statement that echoed the Socialist stand. Even Christian Democrats were gingerly deserting some of the old doctrines. Speaking to a rally of young party members, Kiesinger allowed that "the establishment of good relations with our neighbors to the east is an obvious necessity." And Franz Josef Strauss, the powerful boss of the party's Bavarian branch, publicly backed away from his insistence on West German participation in a NATO nuclear strike force, thus opening the way for a more conciliatory policy toward the East.

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