How the West Germans Voted
ALLEMANN, F. R.
Local results indicate significant exceptions to conservative trend which re-elected Adenauer How the West Germans Voted Bonn The German elections of September 15 ran true to form. Chancellor...
...In the great port cities of Hamburg and Bremen, where the SPD has had dynamic leaders, it again made a strong showing...
...It thus approached a majority in both places, whereas everywhere else, even in its stronghold of Hesse, it was easily bested by the CDLT...
...For that, more than anything else, is what the average German feared: experiments, i.e., new political, economic or social ideas which might threaten the system under which West Germany has done so well...
...But he might have swayed far more of the undecided, wavering voters...
...The Free Democrats, even more than the SPD, made a varied showing...
...What he says is always well-considered, clearly and logically formulated, hardly ever demagogic— but he fails to carry his audience...
...Apart from these individual cases, the Social Democrats had little cause to rejoice...
...The recent elections provided no answer to this key question...
...In Hamburg, its share of the popular vote rose from 36.7 per cent in 1953 to 45.8 per cent, in Bremen from 39.1 to 46.1...
...The Refugee party suffered a defeat which the increasing integration of the Eastern expellees into the West German economy made inevitable...
...The German party, Adenauer's most faithful coalition partner, owes its seats in the new Bundestag entirely to CDU aid...
...Even the most brilliant political leader could hardly have prevented Adenauer's continued rule...
...In the realm of foreign policy, Germany had gone from total political isolation to partnership with the Western powers under the eight-year tenure of this 81-year-old former Mayor of Cologne...
...In domestic politics, the new West German state was stabilized in a manner which defied any comparison with the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic...
...in 1953, the two major parties gained 74 per cent of the total...
...Yet, the picture is not quite so simple: As anxiously as the Germans cling to their new-won prosperity, they are aware that their political task does not consist merely in defending what has been achieved...
...Erich Ollenhauer, Socialist leader since the death of the formidable Kurt Schumacher, is an honorable man and skilful politician...
...Of course, the example of Clement Attlee shows that this need not be a liability...
...The SPD percentage in this thoroughly working-class state rose from 32 to only 33.5, while Adenauer's climbed from 49 to 54.4...
...But that was exactly what the SPD could not accomplish so long as Moscow made it clear, during Khrushchev's visit to East Berlin and in the last Soviet note to Bonn, that the Russians were totally uninterested in "reunification through neutralization" and that their sole concern was to shore up the discredited Ulbricht satellite regime in East Germany...
...It is precisely here that the great Opposition weakness became apparent...
...A more realistic comparison would attribute the Germans' trusting attitude toward their "national father" to the same mass reaction which produced the Eisenhower landslides in the United States...
...this year, they won 82 per cent (and 439 out of 497 seats in the Bundestag...
...The "deal" of which the SPD spoke, and for which it was willing to pay the price of withdrawal from the Atlantic Pact, struck the West German voters not merely as risky but as a soap-bubble...
...His policy seems, in a way, chemically pure, free from all personal admixture, clean, decent— and completely unattractive...
...Some features of the election campaign justified this interpretation to an extent...
...But the big question remains: To what extent will the party system retain its present orderliness once Chancellor Adenauer is no longer present to assert his personal authority...
...And yet, the comparison between Adenauer and Hitler is as false as it can be...
...The disintegration of the minor parties, bringing the German political system closer and closer to the British, unquestionably adds stability to the young democratic German state...
...In fact, he regarded as an experiment even the replacement of the experienced helmsman on the bridge by a new, untested crew...
...Thus, the only remaining "third party" is the dwindling Free Democratic party, which, though it lost only 325.000 votes, now no longer has the slightest chance of influencing Bundestag decisions...
...Like his British comrade, Ollenhauer would make an excellent captain of a strong Government team (and the SPD definitely could form such a team...
...Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came out a little better and the Social Democratic (SPD) Opposition a little worse than most observers had predicted...
...In Hesse, they lost more than half of their votes, while in Baden-Wiirttemberg, the native state of their new leader Reinhold Maier, they made a gain of fully one-fifth...
...He regarded as an experiment the Opposition's foreign policy, which would take Germany out of NATO in order thereby to obtain Soviet consent to German reunification...
...In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, whose nucleus is the Ruhr, the SPD gained 400,000 new votes, but the CDU gained 900.000...
...Intelligent, thoughtful, conciliatory, he has every essential quality except the two decisive ones: He lacks political passion ("He has too few sleepless nights," one of his friends once said), and has none of the magnetic powrer which distinguishes the natural leader from the efficient party official...
...The voters cast their ballots not for a party but for the man under whom West Germany had made its unprecedented climb to power and prosperity...
...Around the calm, sober, thoroughly unmystical Chancellor, there grew up a kind of "man of destiny" cult which sometimes suggested a parallel with the Hitler hysteria...
...The British Liberal experience has shown how dangerous it is to be a middle group between two large blocs...
...Moreover, these two great commercial centers benefit at least as much as the rest of West Germany—if not more—from the current prosperity...
...retained his Mannheim election district for the SPD only by running 6,000 votes ahead of his party...
...The authoritarian father-image embodied by the gray-headed Chancellor has little in common with the diabolical messianism of a totalitarian leader-image, whose incarnation Hitler was...
...One has the feeling that between him and the masses whom he addresses there is a glass partition which prevents contact...
...The political trend thus continued in the direction of a two-party system: In the 1949 election, the CDU and SPD together collected 60 per cent of all votes...
...It is not surprising that the German people, to whom Adenauer is the living symbol of the Federal Republic, gave him a majority which no other German leader—including Adolf Hitler—ever won in free elections, the 15 million CDU votes were above all votes for the status quo...
...However, these forms conceal widely varying psychological as well as political content...
...Economically, out of the devastated, starving Germany of 1945 has come a "European America" which now outproduces and outtrades all the European victors in World War II...
...This time, the CDU received not only an absolute majority of seats in the Bundestag (as in 1953) but a majority of the popular vote...
...This aversion to any sort of change expresses the conservative temperament of present-day Germany...
...If the Opposition had been able to present a convincing means of reunifying Germany, which is the great national question of the day, it would undoubtedly have done much better at the polls...
...But he could never hold his own in a duel with a personality like Adenauer—unless he were swept into power by an irresistible tide of public opinion, as was the case in England in 1945...
...The forms taken by the worship of Hitler and the veneration of Adenauer may sometimes seem frighteningly similar...
...The Christian Democratic victory was above all a personal vote of confidence for Adenauer...
...Of course, this did not deter him from doing everything possible to confirm the masses in this primitive faith...
...He also regarded as an experiment any socialistic interference in the flourishing German economy, whether il aims at greater "co-determination" for industrial workers or "control" of big business...
...Since the party-failed to win the necessary 5 per cent of the total vote, it has now been excluded from the Bundestag (probably forever...
...Adenauer himself is reported to have been depressed by the "trusting eyes" which he saw all about him at election meetings...
...It is no coincidence that Schmid is the SPD's leading exponent of an undogmatic socialism receptive to new ideas...
...Nothing shows this better than the regional and local departures from the overall conservative trend...
...The SPD, while increasing its popular vote, gained less than even its opponents had anticipated...
...they merely postponed the answer a little longer...
...In Germany, however, the Socialists had to check and divert a tide moving in the opposite direction...
...Though they increased their total popular vote from 28.8 to 31.8 per cent, they had least success where they had expected most: in the West German industrial area, particularly the Ruhr...
...Since the election, SPD spokesmen have again been deploring the German people's excessive reliance on leadership, but the party has made no attempt to take this tsait into account by entrusting the leadership to one of its own many strong personalities...
...By F. R. Allemann The Christian Democrats, it is now apparent, were wise to enter the election campaign with the cry, "No experiments...
...The election was a real catastrophe for the minor parties...
...Careful analysis also suggests that, for the first time, a large part of the youth (including working-class youth) went over to Adenauer...
...Prosperity at home and the need for security in foreign policy were unquestionably the two most important objective causes of the Social Democratic election defeat (which was a defeat, even though the Opposition won 1.5 million new votes and more than a third of the seats in the Bundestag 1, There are some very serious observers who are not satisfied with this and who attribute the CDU's absolute majority simply to the German people's susceptibility to "leader worship," from which Adenauer profited as Hitler once did...
...essentially contemptuous of the people, he knows how to calculate his effects very carefully, even though occasionally they make him squirm...
...Moreover, in the South German state of Baden-Wiirttemberg, the Vice President of the Bundestag, Carlo Schmid...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 40
