House Divided

Schmidt faces his foes

Most political leaders look forward to party conventions as festive tributes to their achievements, real or imagined. Not Helmut Schmidt. This week, as 400 delegates from West Germany's ruling Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.) meet in a concrete, saucer-shaped hall built for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the West German Chancellor faces the sharpest criticism and the most divisive party battle of his eight-year tenure. So important is the confrontation that Schmidt has threatened to resign if the S.P.D. does not support his policy on nuclear defense. Though it appears unlikely that he will have to do so, the five-day debate may further undermine Schmidt's authority at home and abroad.

The key issue at stake is Bonn's support for a 1979 NATO decision to deploy 572 new U.S.-built intermediate-range nuclear missiles in five Western European countries, including West Germany, starting in late 1983. At the insistence of Schmidt and other Western European leaders, the alliance simultaneously called for negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which began in Geneva last November, with the goal of reducing the number of atomic weapons in Europe. The Europeans hoped that, if the U.S. could persuade Moscow to eliminate the 300 SS-20 missile launchers that could be aimed at Western Europe, NATO would not need to respond by deploying its own new missiles. But the powerful left wing of the S.P.D. opposes the Doppelbeschluss, or two-track decision, as risking an unnecessary escalation of the arms race. Bolstered by the strength of the West German peace movement, Schmidt's critics in the party have set out to defeat his defense policies at the Munich congress, even if it means toppling him in the process.

The party hierarchy tried to head off an open fight by proposing to postpone the whole issue until a special convention in the fall of 1983. The party hoped to give the U.S.-Soviet talks enough time to make progress. The left-wingers, however, would not go along with this maneuver. At local party meetings, they presented a battery of motions opposing the Doppelbeschluss. The left's main hope is pinned on a proposal for a total freeze on all new NATO and Warsaw Pact intermediate-range missiles until the Geneva negotiations end. Says Erhard Eppler, a leader of the peace movement and one of Schmidt's main critics within the S.P.D.: "The two-track decision has one major fault. It is meant to pressure the Soviets, but not the Americans."

Moscow has been quick to take advantage of Schmidt's problems. Last month President Leonid Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union had frozen its deployment of SS-20s, urging NATO to reverse its 1979 decision. President Reagan refused, arguing that a freeze would preserve the Soviet advantage.

Nearly half of the 22 regional party organizations have passed resolutions favoring the moratorium. Still, Schmidt's political advisers are confident that at least 60%, and possibly as many as 80%, of the delegates wih1 reject the idea. Their reasoning is that voting on the local motions usually took place late in the evening, when most rank-and-file party members had gone home to bed and only the left-wing intellectual activists remained behind. But at the congress left-wingers are outnumbered by the more conservative workers who form the party's backbone.

Even if Schmidt has his way at the congress, he still faces serious challenges. According to a poll published last week, the Social Democrats would win only 33% of the vote if a national election were held now, vs. the 42.9% they won when Schmidt was re-elected Chancellor in 1980 as the head of a coalition. Schmidt was worried enough about such poll results to write a twelve-page article pleading for party unity. "For many citizens, our political contours have become unclear," he wrote. "It would be dangerous if we drove disillusioned voters in the center of the political spectrum into the arms of the Christian Democratic opposition."

The only good news for Schmidt as he packed his bags for Munich was that, in spite of his party's troubles, he remains his country's most popular politician. To give his government a new image, Schmidt was making plans to reshuffle key portfolios in his Cabinet. But given the mood in Munich, it was unlikely that any move could detract attention for long from the Social Democrats' deep divisions.

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