East Germany: A Day at the Races

As all Communists know, East Germany is a “Democratic Republic,” and with regularity Communist Party Boss Walter Ulbricht hauls 99.8% of his faithful electorate off to the polls to vote the official state slate. Last week’s provincial and local elections, however, were to have been different. The people, decreed Democrat Ulbricht, would actually be given a choice: there would be 246,000 candidates for 204,000 jobs.

Voters in the decadent bourgeois states might not consider that much of a choice, but the privilege of crossing out two names on a twelve-man ballot held obvious appeal for the average East German. Perhaps too obvious, decided Ulbricht at the last minute. Fearing that the voters might go wild with their pencils and cross out some party stalwarts, he welshed on the deal. The only patriotic way to vote, East Germans were told, was not to cross out any names at all.

The message got across. Under the watchful eyes of local party foremen, the only race on election day was among the voters at the polls. Scarcely even looking at the ballots handed them, they rushed them to the boxes as fast as possible for all to see that they could not possibly have had time to be unpatriotic. The result: only two candidates out of nearly a quarter of a million were defeated, and the voters left the regime with about 40,000 more candidates than there were jobs.