Socialist Showdown

Gone from the hall in Bad Godesberg were the usual red flags with which West Germany's Socialist party has always announced its allegiance to the workers. Instead, as the Socialists met in emergency session last week, they faced decorations of totally nonpolitical yellow chrysanthemums. The switch was both intentional and symbolic. The leaders of the Social Democrats are trying to turn the world's oldest Socialist party (104 years) into a more broadly based "people's party." The trouble with the effort is that it has raised a storm of protest from the trade unions, long the backbone of the party. The unions angrily charge that the party has sold out its Socialist principles in return for a role as junior partner to the conservative Christian Democrats in Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger's eleven-month-old Grand Coalition.

Particularly Furious. The Socialists have been out of power in Germany for 36 years, ever since they served briefly in the Weimar Republic coalition. Now that they have the responsibility of government, things look different than when they merely opposed. The unions accuse them of acting like reactionaries--of dismantling the German welfare system because they voted to impose small prescription and health-insurance fees on pensioners, of sabotaging the coal-mining Ruhr because they refuse to block U.S. oil imports, and of giving aid and comfort to capitalists because Socialist Economics Minister Karl Schiller has pumped government spending into industry instead of giving bigger unemployment benefits to workers. The discontent has grown so great that it has threatened to undercut the positions of the Socialist leaders in Bonn and to paralyze the workings of the coalition.

Alarmed by this development, Party Boss Willy Brandt, the coalition's Foreign Minister, called the emergency conference to enable the unions and local politicians to let off steam. Both groups are particularly furious at Herbert Wehner, the terrible-tempered party strategist of the coalition. They blame him for coming all too speedily to the troubled Christian Democrats' rescue by agreeing to a coalition, thus depriving the Socialists of a chance to take over completely in the next election.

Wehner and Socialist ministers in the coalition defended their actions as necessary for Germany's welfare, promised to press hard for Socialist goals when the country can better afford them. Brandt managed to defuse the conference by warning the Christian Democrats not to expect the Socialists to be "meek as lambs." "I call the Grand Coalition neither a marriage of love nor a shotgun marriage," he said, "but a question of practical politics." After that, the Socialist delegates departed, considerably meeker themselves.

Political Polarization. For the moment, Brandt and his ministers had staved off a revolt and saved the coalition at a time when it needed a new display of confidence. Though it has been able to straighten out the country's tangled budget, halt the recession and initiate a new and more independent foreign policy, the coalition has had one negative effect. By uniting West Germany's two dominant parties in one center-oriented government, it has blocked out effective parliamentary opposition on both the right and left. As a result, those who do not like the government's actions have tended to migrate to small "extraparliamentary" opposition groups at either extreme of the political spectrum.

On the far right, the National Democrats made their best showing yet in the recent Bremen state elections and, if present trends continue, may place as many as 20 or 30 delegates in the Bundestag after the 1969 elections. On the left, most of Germany's intellectuals have deserted the Socialists--who have suffered the most serious vote losses-for nihilistic New Left parties and a Red-fronting German Peace Union. German politicians consider this polarization to be a warning that the Grand Coalition must get on with its mission of modernizing West Germany's archaic political structure and then split up. Only then will the country have again a strong two-party system that can direct dissent into constructive channels, thus preventing it from becoming the property of political extremists.

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