The Spring of Discontent

German Chancellor Willy Brandt is unhappy. He had hoped to attend next week's Social Democratic congress in Hannover with a renewed sense of strength as a result of his electoral victory last November. Instead, he is bothered, beleaguered and beset on all sides.

His most immediate problem is posed by the so-called Jusos, his party's youth wing, which is dominated by strident young Marxists. Two weeks ago, the Jusos endorsed a party platform that conflicts greatly with the pragmatic policies by which Brandt led the Social Democrats and their Free Democrat allies to triumph. Among the Jusos proposals: withdrawal of German financial support for U.S. troops in NATO. Brandt warned that if the Social Democrats adopt the Jusos platform he would quit. Said Brandt: "I could not take the responsibility for something that contradicts what I and others found broad electoral support for."

The Jusos challenge hardly seems overpowering, but it has been strengthened by the fact that Brandt so far has been unable to make good on a single major campaign promise. He had pledged to make reforms in taxation and education and provide greater worker representation on the boards of industrial firms. But Brandt's efforts have been frustrated by the less-liberal Free Democrats, whose 41 seats in the Bundestag provide him with a 46-vote margin over the opposition.

Similarly, Brandt's famed Ostpolitik has lately met with obduracy from East European leaders. The Poles are reneging on their agreement to repatriate thousands of ethnic Germans. The Czechs refuse to discuss the establishment of diplomatic relations until Bonn denounces as null and void from the start the 1938 Munich Agreement that ceded part of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich. Hungary, in turn, will not deal with West Germany until it first complies with Prague's demands.

Worse still, Brandt's plan to improve relations with East Germany is floundering. The East Germans are cutting short a program of reuniting families divided by the cold war, and are setting up new bureaucratic obstacles hindering freedom of travel between the two parts of Germany.

Brandt's popularity remains high in West Germany, and his grip on his party's top job is unchallenged--but he is now tired and tense. If the Hannover congress should fail to support him fully in the face of the Jusos rebellion, he might tell it to look for a new leader.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.