West Germany: Brutuses on the Rhine

Brutues on the Rhine

Ludwig Erhard’s stock has been going down faster than any glamor issue on the Big Board. Climbing living costs have tarnished his image as the creator of West Germany’s economic miracle. A sharp setback for his Christian Democratic Union in the key state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia took the steam out of his reputation as the country’s No. 1 vote getter. Even his special relationship with the U.S. was called into question after he came away from a Washington visit in September without a promise from Lyndon Johnson to reduce the amount of money Bonn must spend next year to offset the costs of maintaining U.S. troops in West Germany. Last week came Erhard’s severest shock of all: he found himself in the uncomfortable position of running the first minority government in West Germany’s postwar history.

Humiliating Headlines. It came about with the sudden defection of his coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, whose 49 votes were enough to give Erhard control of the Bundestag. The basic issue seemed to be Erhard’s 1967 budget, which, largely owing to the “offset” purchases of U.S. weaponry, is expected to run $1 billion into the red. His own Christian Democratic ministers agreed that taxes would have to be raised to cover the costs of large purchases of U.S. weaponry. But Vice Chancellor Erich Mende and his three F.D.P. colleagues in the Cabinet cried “nein.”

With elections coming up this month in two important West German states, Mende was determined to dissociate himself from Erhard and stake out a popular vote-catching position for his party. In a marathon Cabinet session, Mende argued for holding the tax line. Having made his point, he finally settled for a compromise whereby Erhard pledged to resort to increased taxes only if economizing measures proved insufficient. Next morning the humiliation of the headlines—FREE DEMOCRATS CAVE IN —forced the Free Democrats to reconsider their position. Within a few hours, Mende telephoned Erhard that the F.D.P. had quit the coalition.

New Alignments? Erhard accepted the decision with grim calm. Refusing to quit or call new national elections, he doubled up the assignments of some of his ministers to cover the vacated portfolios and vowed to carry on business as usual. His strongest support was West Germany’s constitution, which states that a Chancellor can be removed from office only when a majority of the Bundestag can agree in advance on his successor.

For the moment, such an agreement seems out of the question. Still, Bonn hummed with rumors of startling new alignments in West German politics. As unlikely as it seemed, whispers rose that the Free Democrats might join with the Social Democratic Party in a coalition government and thus break 17 years of uninterrupted Christian Democrat rule. Mende, eager to establish a bargaining position with Erhard, declared that “in principle” he saw no objection to a coalition with the Socialists. There was also talk of a “grand coalition” between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, with Interior Minister Paul Lücke as Chancellor. It was a course especially attractive to both the Christian Demo cratic left wing and Erhard’s enemies, since the alliance would exclude him from such a government.

The big beneficiaries in the crisis were, of course, the Socialists. Party Leader Willy Brandt chose to play a cautious game. Since the national polls showed the Socialists comfortably ahead, Brandt reckoned that it would be wiser to wait until elections and take a chance on gaining power as a majority government rather than to link up now with either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats.

Distant Enemies. The crisis laid bare the ugly infighting in the C.D.U. Of the leading Christian Democratic politicians, only Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder really rallied to Erhard’s side. Most of the others seemed poised, in the words of Erich Mende, like “Brutuses waiting to strike down the Chancellor’s Julius Caesar.” Some seemed happy to make the coalition rebuilding job as difficult as possible.

Yet such a job was not out of the question. At week’s end Erhard turned up to toast Mende at his 50th birthday celebration. Would the Free Democrats some day rejoin his government? a reporter asked Erhard. “Why not?” shot back the Chancellor, but Mende chimed in that he had a condition: Erhard must first clean out the troublemakers within his own party.