West Germany: New Direction

All over West Germany, amateur bookmakers were willing to give high odds that the West German election campaign was rolling along in an old, familiar direction—toward one more smashing success for the man who had won three times before: doughty Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 85. Not even the energetic charm of the Socialists’ new candidate, West Berlin’s 47-year-old Mayor Willy Brandt, seemed likely to make a dent on Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union with its twelve-year record of booming prosperity and close ties with the West. Running far ahead in the polls, the Christian Democrats scarcely bothered to change their slogans from the last elections, hauled out dusty old placards: NO EXPERIMENTS, SUCCESS AND EXPERIENCE, ADENAUER AND HIS TEAM.

Crisis Change. Then, last week, there was a different tone, in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s Berlin blockbuster. East Germany’s angry belligerence at the Brandenburg Gate had the incidental effect of propelling Candidate Brandt into the limelight and Candidate Adenauer into the wings. As custodian of the embattled city, Willy Brandt was smack in front of the TV cameras when Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. troop reinforcements arrived to bolster West Berliners’ morale.

Although Adenauer was claiming that he had made the first suggestion that the U.S. send a high Government official to Berlin, many would remember that he had rebuked Brandt for his letter to Washington demanding “not merely words, but political action” to save the city. Belatedly, the busy Chancellor flew up to Berlin last week to address the voters, prompting Bonn’s usually pro-C.D.U. General-Anzeiger to note acidly that “an earlier visit certainly would have saved the Berliners many hours of hopelessness.” The Chancellor had, critics pointed out. found time at the height of the crisis to drop down to Regensburg for an election rally.*

Adenauer was far too seasoned and popular a campaigner to be dismayed by the turn of events. Never since the war had the Socialists won more than 32% of the popular vote in a national election (the C.D.U.’s 1957 poll: 50.2%), and it was scarcely conceivable that they would collect anything like a majority this time. But with an attractive candidate—and with a voting public that is traditionally unpredictable in times of travail—the Socialists hope to collect up to 40% of the vote; they figure that that might tempt the small but important Free Democratic Party, normally closer to Adenauer’s C.D.U.. into a controlling Socialist-led coalition.

“Ich Will Willy!” To forestall such a drastic possibility, backers of the C.D.U. redoubled their efforts and their contributions. But Brandt was hitting the hustings hard; he had covered 13,000 miles, made 503 speeches in whistle-stop tours through West Germany. Last week he was darting out from West Berlin on quickie one-day junkets to Hanau, Offenbach and Hamm, where audiences shouted, “Ich will Willy! [I want Willy],” the kind of cry his election experts learned how to drum up while following the Kennedy and Nixon campaign trails across the U.S. last fall.

Until the pollsters produced some fresh straw-vote results this week, no one would know how much of a boost the Berlin crisis had actually given Willy Brandt. No one may really know until the electorate gets down to marking the ballots on Sept. 17. But in the wake of the Communists’ blow, there was a slight—and only slight—question of Konrad Adenauer’s continued dominance.

* Where, in an unworthy blow, he referred to his opponent as “Herr Brandt, alias Frahm” a reference to the Berlin mayor’s illegitimate birth.