GERMANY: Fiasco

The issue in Berlin’s quadripartite municipal elections had been clearly drawn between the Russian-backed SED (Socialist Unity Party) and three other parties (Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberals) which had U.S.British sympathy. The SED was crushingly beaten.

The election’s most dramatic conflict was between the SED and the Social Democrats. On the surface they were both Socialist workingmen’s parties (said one cynical Berlin-voter: “Don’t vote for either of them, they both know what they want. Vote CDU or LDP, they don’t know what they want and won’t bother us”).

But the gulf between SED and the Social Democrats is essentially the same deep gulf that divides all of Europe. Last year, a large segment of the Social Democratic Party had refused to merge with the Communists in the formation of the Russian-sponsored SED. Now, in a scrupulously fair and orderly election (there were watchers from all four parties at the polls and Allied Kommandatura control teams cruised through the city), the Social Democratic Party managed to get more than twice as many votes as SED. Even the Sedists’ desperate last minute campaign stunts, including a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, fireworks and free potatoes, were in vain. The results:

Social Democrats first (with about 48.8% of the total votes cast), Christian Democrats second 22.2%), SED third 19.7%) and Liberals, the only party which advocates a free-enterprise economy, fourth (9.3%).

Significantly, SED polled exactly the same amount of votes which the Communist Party polled in Berlin’s last free elections before Hitler, in 1933. It was a measure of its disastrous unpopularity that it was beaten even in the Russian sector of Berlin. TIME’S Berlin Bureau Chief John Scott cabled a portentous conclusion: “This fiasco will, in my view, clinch the opinion of Russian leaders that they must resign themselves to losing political control, at least temporarily, over almost any area where reasonable political freedom exists.”