GERMANY: THE SPD IN TROUBLE

...The real issue is Benneter's intention to lead his group into collaboration with the DKP and its satellite organizations such as the "Committee for Peace, Disarmament and Cooperation...

...These tactics have alienated many old cadres...

...Thanks to this split, Schmidt has been able to retain a narrow but workable majority in the 1976 Bundestag elections...

...They only notice that unemployment went from zero to 1.2 million (5 234 percent), with inflation remaining around 4 percent...

...This 30year-old Berlin lawyer (the Jusos' age limit is a rather mature 35 years) subscribes to the so-called Stamokap theory, which sees in the modern capitalist state little more than the arm of monopoly capitalism...

...opposition...

...Brandt's dynamic policy and open personality attracted the support of many intellectuals to the SPD (with Ginter Grass in the forefront), and it helped the party to reach out beyond the old working-class constituency to the new white-collar middle class of technicians, middle managers, public employees, and academics...

...foreign policy after Kissinger...

...Schmidt, who comes from the right wing of the party, an ex-Army officer who had joined the SPD after the war, was a capable Defense and Finance minister under Brandt...

...Many of them, mostly students with virtually no working-class support, have lately tended to enter the orbit of the West German Communist party (DKP), which is supposedly independent but in fact Moscow-oriented...

...The party's right wing has long advocated such a step, and only the intervention of Brandt and his associates had kept open this avenue for a badly needed input of new blood and thereby brought a number of promising young leftists into the Bundestag and government...

...Yet, in some other places, Jusos in office have initiated valuable reforms...

...Add to all this the growing political liability of the SPD's own youth organization, the Young Socialists (Jusos), which has been dominated by radical neo-Marxist students and academics...

...It may hurt the party's public image among middleclass voters, but it is contradicted by the Jusos' ultimate willingness to work for reform within the system in the absence of any revolutionary prospects...

...There are other problems, some endemic, some new...

...There is the burden of holding the recessionridden European Community together...

...However, the party lost its leading position in several of the Lander (states') parliaments during that year, including Rhineland-Westphalia, the most industrialized and populous among them...

...Perhaps because of these traits, the unquestionable success of Schmidt's economic policies—which has kept both unemployment and inflation in the Bundesrepublik far lower than in any other industrial country—has gone largely unappreciated by his compatriots...

...There is the recently stymied state of relations with the DDR—and the uncertainty about U.S...

...Under Brandt's leadership, West Germany, the only major country on the continent without a significant Communist party, had achieved the "opening to the East...

...Such connections have long been banned in the SPD...

...It will undoubtedly face an emboldened conservative opposition whose right wing in particular feels buoyed by success...

...In addition, the government has had to face several troublesome domestic crises this spring: • Its own "Watergate" scandals of illegal wiretapping...

...He is known to be impatient of obstacles, and to complain bitterly about the cumbersome requirements of parliamentary democracy: "85 percent of one's time is wasted in explaining one's decisions before 1,001 committees...

...He is an administrator, extremely capable in organization and economics, but he lacks political flair...

...The party's Executive Committee has seized upon the Konkret interview to suspend Benneter as Juso chairman, and has initiated proceedings to expel him from the party...

...Clearly, the SPD lost not just the middle-class vote to the CDU: in addition, I understand, thousands of old party faithfuls had stayed home...

...Luckily, there is a distinct lack of harmony in the conservative camp: Helmuth Kohl, the moderate leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU), a kind of German Gerald Ford, is under attack from the rabid rightist Franz-Josef Strauss...

...He is an effective orator, but lacks personal warmth and concern for people...

...But the real catastrophy was the loss of the "red" state of Hesse in the municipal elections of March 20, 1977...

...All these specific items point to a deeper cause for dissatisfaction: the party in Hesse had become stale in power, was taking the voters for granted, and had ignored clear warning signals...

...In a sometimes precarious but on the whole successful coalition with the small liberal Free Democratic party (FDP), Brandt had demonstrated the SPD's ability to handle the affairs of the nation...

...The growing opposition to the construction of nuclear power plants, a particularly sensitive matter in a densely populated country with insufficient energy-resource alternatives...

...Yet Brandt did not disappear from public life...

...The Jusos themselves have been beset by problems of recruitment because of the recent change of spirit among students who in Germany as elsewhere are now more interested in careers than in changing the world...

...several prominent cases of political corruption...

...In a number of local organizations—the city of Munich is the most notable example—Jusos have managed to achieve control, often with disastrous political results, inlcuding the threat of secession by the right wing of the SPD...

...He is a man of keen intelligence, quick decision and sharp tongue, and can perhaps best be described as the epitome of the technocrat...

...In his second term, however, Brandt ran into unexpected trouble, and in 1974 he threw in the sponge, hurt by intrigues in his own party, but above all by the discovery that he had sheltered a major East German spy in his chancellery...

...In addition to his parliamentary seat in the Bundestag, he retained the leadership of the party...

...The Stamokap theory, however, is not the major source of conflict between the Jusos and the party...

...In this position he was to play an important part on the international scene: in supporting Suares in Portugal and Gonzalez in Spain...

...As students and young academics, Juso members have at times outtalked and outlasted the ordinary membership in long night meetings, pushing through resolutions and delegate slates after many of the older members with jobs and family had gone home...

...Last March, opponents scored a legal victory in their fight against a project in Wyhl (in the Black Forest area...

...Under a vital Social Democratic leadership West Germany could play a prominent role in this period...

...Reversion to a conservative government that is not in step with the times would thus be all the more deplorable...

...a major administrative reform that consolidated counties, cities, and suburbs, often ignoring historical sensibilities...

...Then, the bugging of lawyer-defendant conferences in a Wurttemberg jail during the two-year-long trial of members of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang (whose presumed friends recently murdered the prosecutor in the case...

...Radical youth groups have begun to seize upon this issue...

...And on that very day, the Young Socialists (Jusos) replaced their outgoing chairperson, who had managed to keep their and her own radicalism within bounds 235 acceptable to the party, with the most radical of three contenders, Klaus-Uwe Benneter...

...In Frankfurt, Hesse's and Germany's largest city with a continuous SPD majority, the party's support dropped from over 50 to below 40 percent of the vote, while the Christian Democrats' (CDU) vote jumped from 37 to 52 percent, well above their own expectations...

...At this moment, one encounters in the party a spirit of frustration bordering on defeatism...

...Since the Schmidt government has still almost three years to go until the next Bundestag election, these regional defeats need not affect it immediately...

...Besides, much of the Jusos' verbal radicalism is exploited and used against the party by the conservative press...

...in reorienting the Socialist International (whose president he became in December 1976) toward stronger cooperation with the Third World and with liberal Democrats in the U.S...

...Benneter, meanwhile, has been talking out of both sides of his mouth: in an interview in the Spiegel he intimated that he might pull back from such collaboration for purely tactical reasons: in the radical monthly Konkret he says that he envisages a separation from the SPD...

...This policy, at the price of de facto recognition of the East German DDR, had paved the way fora measure of economic, cultural, and personal exchange between the two Germanies—family visits and reunions, emigration to the West for older people, release of political prisoners purchased with economic concessions, etc...

...Although nationwide it never received more than 1.5 percent of the vote, the DKP was able to muster 10 percent of the vote in the university city of Giessen in the recent Hesse elections...

...This political fortress had been held by the SPD's traditional left wing without interruption since the re-formation of the country after the war and had produced some exemplary progressive legislation...

...This, in effect, means a kind of split within the Young Socialist organization whose form will probably minimize the radicals' exodus...

...First, that of Traube, a nuclear scientist working in secret research and suspect because of his association with the lawyer and friend of a terrorist radical (Traube has since been cleared, but not yet regained his job...

...Brandt also established contact and visited with President Carter soon after the inauguration—a visit all the more important because his successor, Chancellor Helmuth Schmidt, as most of Europe's political leaders, had barely concealed his preference for Gerald Ford...

...In the process, the SPD had completed its transformation from a labor party to a "people's party...

...An ingrown bureaucracy had lost touch with the people...

...The Hesse debacle has been blamed on a number of specific matters: a well-conceived but too brusquely introduced school reform...

...Thus, while it had expected some losses, the party was unprepared for the landslide victory of the CDU under Dregger, a leading rightist to boot...

...q 236...

...Add to this the Schmidt government's unpopular (national) attempt to postpone an explicitly promised increase in old-age pensions only weeks after the last Bundestag election...

...THE RESULT is a growing general uneasiness...

...There are the difficulties of maintaining the high level of exports (almost one quarter of all production) on which the West German economy depends, one reason for the obstinacy with which Schmidt pursued the nuclear power deal with Brazil in the face of stern U.S...

...It is particularly unfortunate that this comes at a time when the political developments in France, Italy, and the United States, and on the other hand in Eastern Europe, pose new problems and present new opportunities...

...other opponents, at the same time, have staged violent demonstrations at Brockdorf, another proposed site...

...and Canada...

...The magazine Der Spiegel quotes the Dutch socialist Sicco Mansholt (until recently head of the EEC): "Schmidt is not a politician...

...These things meant much to many people...