Trouble on the Flanks

Parties of the extreme left or right hold little attraction for the great majority of West German voters, who remember all too well Germany's disastrous plunge into Nazi extremism in the 1930s. As a bulwark against political radicalism, the West German Constitution bans all parties that espouse principles inconsistent with a free and democratic society. Despite these psychological and legal barriers, parties of both the far left and far right were once again troublesomely active last week in West Germany.

Tear-Gas Attack. On the far right, the four-year-old National Democratic Party suffered its first setback at the polls when rightist candidates collected only 5.2% of the vote in local elections in the big West German state of Lower Saxony, which borders on East Germany. Until now, the National Democrats have been winning a higher percentage of the vote in each succeeding election, gaining 9.8% in last April's state elections in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

A few days after the Lower Saxony elections, the National Democrats' leader, Adolf von Thadden, was forced to suspend a series of scheduled party rallies after some 1,500 students broke up his first appearance on the hustings in Bonn. Shouting "Get the Nazis out of here," the students drowned out Von Thadden's speech and chased him from the podium with tear gas. But despite the setback in Lower Saxony, most forecasts predict that in next year's West German general elections, the National Democrats will win at least 40 of the Bundestag's 496 seats.

On the far left, the Communists, who were outlawed by the West German Supreme Court in 1956, have come back out in the open. They skirted the constitutional prohibition by pledging to abide by democratic precepts. Even so, their reception in West Germany was hardly cordial. Nightriders pumped seven slugs into the party's new headquarters in Bonn, hitting no one. The leaders of the Grand Coalition could only be dismayed at the timing of the Communists' reappearance.

Clever Timing. In the days before the Czechoslovak crisis, Foreign Minister Willy Brandt held that West Germany should allow the Communists to operate as a legal party if it expected his new Ostpolitik to achieve its goal: establishing normal relations with the East bloc. But at that time, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht stonewalled Brandt's plan by ordering West German Reds to stay underground. Ulbricht feared that the West German diplomatic initiatives would isolate his unpopular satrapy; therefore he wanted to be able to denounce Bonn throughout Eastern Europe by pointing out the Federal Republic's "persecution" of Communists at home.

Now that the Soviets have effectively halted, at least for the present, Bonn's diplomatic and economic penetration into Eastern Europe, Ulbricht has cleverly seized upon West Germany's earlier permissive attitude to set up a new party. By so doing, he and his Soviet superiors have accomplished two important goals: they have 1) founded a new, hard-lining party in Western Europe at a time when the major Western European parties have split with Moscow over the Czechoslovak invasion, and 2) created an instrument for stirring up political strife in the Federal Republic.

The two leaders of the new party are Kurt Bachmann, a 59-year-old Cologne journalist, and Kurt Erlebach, 46, who is also a newspaperman. Their immediate aim is to recruit 5,000 members by year's end, but most of them will probably come from the ranks of the old outlawed organization. Says Erlebach: "You don't expect us to create a Communist party from Salvation Army members, do you?" The appearance of the new Communist party poses an interlocking dilemma for the government of Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger. It can hardly suppress the National Democrats without also taking legal action against the Communists. Yet any move against the new Communist party will run the risk of unduly provoking the Soviets. At the same time, West German inaction toward the National Democrats will only provide the Soviets with another excuse to charge that "Nazism is again flourishing in full bloom on the political soil in Bonn," as Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko did last week before the United Nations' General Assembly.

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