Losing City Hall

A vote against Schmidt's party

Western Europe's political leaders have been fairly warned. If there is any discernible mood sweeping the Continent, it is an indiscriminate, throw-the-rascals-out rejection of the status quo. On the same day that Valery Discard d'Estaing was losing the French presidency to Socialist Franc,ois Mitterrand, West Berlin voters were giving a similar demonstration of discontent with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democrats, who had ruled the divided city for 26 years. Tainted by corruption, the city's Social Democratic Party polled a meager 38.4%, its worst postwar score, and down more than four points from the last election in 1979. The S.P.D.'s coalition partners, the Free Democrats (F.D.P.), won only 5.6% of the vote, barely clearing the 5% necessary for representation in the city assembly.

The outcome was a severe blow to the Social Democrats. Nearly six months after Schmidt's re-election as Chancellor, his party had lost a traditional fief. It now holds power in only four of West Germany's eleven states. Moreover, the vote indicated that Schmidt's support of nuclear energy and the basing of new U.S. missiles on West German soil are meeting increasing resistance in the electorate. S.P.D. leftists had already come out in favor of disarmament and looser links with NATO. As the Chancellor prepared for talks with Ronald Reagan in Washington this week, he seemed more vulnerable than he has at any other time since taking office in 1974.

Yet the Berlin election did not produce a clear-cut victor. The Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.) garnered 47.9% of the vote, its best showing ever, but the party still fell short of a majority. The biggest winner in this disillusioned city of 2 million, beset by youth protest and a wave of squatters taking over vacant buildings, was the Alternative List: a motley array of leftists, environmentalists, pacifists and others who reject all aspects of West German society. Using the symbol of a green hedgehog, this irreverent protest group polled 7.2%, and for the first time gained representation in the city parliament with nine seats. The Alternativen thus upset the old three-party balance and complicated the task of finding a working majority.

West Berlin's elections were held two years early because a scandal over municipal building contracts forced the resignation of S.P.D. Mayor Dietrich Stobbe last January. To halt the decline of the S.P.D. in its onetime bastion, Schmidt had sent his federal justice minister, Hans-Jochen Vogel, 55, to take over as mayor and prepare for new elections. A popular former mayor of Munich widely regarded as Schmidt's heir apparent, Vogel made an impressive effort. He stopped officials from forcibly evicting squatters and stumped the city, pumping hands, urging restraint, promising reform. A pre-election poll put his personal popularity rating eight points ahead of his opponent, silver-haired Richard von Weizsaecker, 61, the competent but colorless C.D.U. candidate who had come out squarely against the squatters.

But Vogel could not carry the party with him. The city's young people -- their ranks swollen because Berlin residents get draft deferments -- blamed the S.P.D. for an acute shortage of decent, affordable housing, and they rebelled against police suppression of those who protest on the streets against these conditions. Their elders held the Social Democrats responsible for the breakdown of law-and-order arising from clashes between police and demonstrators.

The election results left Christian Democrat Von Weizsaecker just two seats short of a legislative majority, and he spent much of last week looking for a coalition partner. The Alternativen quickly refused, as did the S.P.D. That left the Free Democrats, who seemed reluctantly open to the idea. Explained Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the party leader: "Part of our national responsibility is to ensure stable government in Berlin."

Schmidt bravely concurred, noting that a C.D.U.-F.D.P. coalition already runs the state government of the Saarland. But the prospect of shifting alliances in Berlin inevitably touched off talk of similar moves in Bonn, where F.D.P. right-wingers are increasingly impatient with the leftists in Schmidt's unruly party. That, in turn, raised a larger question in Europe's changing political climate: Giscard is gone; is Schmidt in trouble too?

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