Squaring Off for the Battle of the Decade

AS West Germans celebrated Oktoberfest last week, the country fairly crackled with an excitement and ebullience that went far beyond the enjoyment of Gemueitlichkeit. On the streets, in restaurants, beer halls, offices and shops from West Berlin to Bavaria, West Germans could be heard engaged in a great, continuing national debate on the election that will be held Nov. 19. The vote, beyond ending a deadlock that has turned their Bundestag into a cockpit of frustration, will amount to nothing less than a referendum on the future of the Federal Republic. It will decide whether West Germany will continue on the three-year-old course set by Chancellor Willy Brandt and his left-of-center Social Democrats--or return to the leadership of the more conservative Christian Democrats who governed West Germany for 20 years after World War II.

Early Vote. The election is also a highly personal contest between two strikingly different men. On the one side is Willy Brandt, 58, the popular, outgoing Chancellor, who comes over on television as "our Willy"--and a statesman besides. He set in motion a whole movement toward detente in Europe, with his innovative Ostpolitik. If the election were merely a popularity contest or a plebiscite on foreign policy, Brandt would win handily.

On the other side is Rainer Barzel, 48, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, an able but unpopular politician whose chief problem has been winning trust (see box, next page). Barzel, however, has a deep-running issue: inflation. Prices are rising at the rate of 5.5% per year, a frightening spectacle to Germans who remember the disastrous inflationary days after World War I. Though there is no evidence that Barzel could do better than Brandt at controlling inflation, his party is known for heading the government that produced the Wirtschajtswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s, a period of rapid growth and stable prices.

West Germany's election is a year ahead of schedule, and was called as a last resort to break a paralyzing tie vote in the Bundestag. There, Brandt and his coalition partners, the Free Democrats, led by Walter Scheel, could command only 248 votes--exactly the same number mustered by Barzel and his allies, the Christian Social Union, which flourishes in Bavaria under Franz Josef Strauss. Originally, Brandt had enjoyed a 254-242 margin; the gradual defection of six Bundestag members, however, reduced that to a tie. Brandt, in consequence, could no longer govern or even get his budget passed. Because the West German constitution made no provision for such a situation, the only way the Chancellor could bring about an election was to call for a vote of confidence--and deliberately arrange to lose it. Barzel did not fail to use the opportunity to depict Brandt as a loser whose policies had been repudiated.

For the opening round of his campaign last week, Brandt boarded a special eight-car maroon train for a whistle-stopping tour through Kassel, the small medieval towns of Eschwege and Northeim, and on to Hanover and Wiesbaden. He assured listeners in the towns bordering East Germany that "each little step toward peace has helped," and prophesied that within a few years families separated by the frontier would soon be able to visit freely again. "We need all the votes we can get," he told the large and enthusiastic crowds. "Help me, my friends." His audiences responded with a chant: "Willy, Willy, Willy."

Brandt began his campaign in the border towns in part to point up the chief accomplishment of his three-year-old government. As he can justly boast, he has reduced "tension and confrontation" between the two Germanys and between the East and West blocs. By signing treaties with Moscow and Warsaw that renounced Germany's old land claims--and by accepting the division of Germany into what Bonn now refers to as "two states in one nation" --Brandt led the way toward detente in Europe. His early initiatives eventually led to a four-power agreement on Berlin, the first direct negotiations between the two Germanys, and an improved climate for an international conference on European security. Between now and November, Brandt and Chief West German Negotiator Egon Bahr hope to reach agreement with the German Democratic Republic on a treaty that will define the relationship between the two states and establish formal contacts. If they succeed, it will be a notable advantage.

Brandt's campaign will blend Social Democratic achievements in foreign policy with a defense of less spectacular domestic efforts. "We made peace more secure; we came closer to the Germans in the G.D.R.," he pointed out in an interview with TIME Correspondent Bruce Nelan last week at the Chancellor's Palais Schaumburg office. "Our policy toward Eastern Europe serves our own national interests as well as the overall efforts of the Western alliance. How could voters possibly trust them [the C.D.U.-C.S.U.] to carry on this foreign policy, trust those who rejected almost everything that Washington, London, Paris and Bonn have tried to accomplish in the field of East-West detente these past three years?" Farther afield, Brandt pointed out, "We shall establish diplomatic relations with China this month." Turning to domestic matters, the Chancellor argued that the C.D.U. was wrong on its major issue of inflation: "The opposition still seems to follow the thinking that a major part of the job can be done in the Federal Republic, while the government has come to the conclusion that the major part has to be done within an integrated Western Europe." In any case, argues Brandt, "our voters know that living conditions are better than three years ago, and they know that Germany enjoys a respected position in the world today."

Brandt is no stranger to close-fought and even dirty campaigns. In 1961 and 1965, while still mayor of West Berlin, he not only ran for Chancellor and lost but was personally smeared in the process. Opponents referred to him as "Herbert Frahm, alias Willy Brandt," an allusion to the fact that he was the illegitimate son of a Lubeck shopgirl and that he later legally changed his name. Brandt--in his youth an active socialist who fled the Nazi regime in 1933 and spent the next twelve years in Scandinavia--was also accused falsely of having fought the Germans as a Norwegian soldier (his wife Rut is Norwegian by birth and a naturalized German).

Double Irony. Curiously enough it is Brandt who has struck one of the nasty blows of the young campaign. Brandt was obviously still rankled by the defections from his coalition that had brought about the parliamentary stalemate. Two weeks ago, he charged repeatedly and publicly that "corruption" was behind the defections, though he offered no evidence beyond his own "subjective conviction." Last week Brandt reiterated the charges in a letter to Bundestag President Kai-Uwe von Hassel, except that he made it clear he was not accusing his opponents of old-fashioned bribery. He wrote: "The term corruption, especially in politics, covers a broad range"--the guarantee of a continued career, of a safe seat at the next election, of power in the Bundestag. To most West Germans, that sounded like politics as usual, but Brandt stubbornly chose to call it "an erosion of political morals."

It was doubly ironic that Barzel, at the beginning of the campaign, should appear as the more restrained of the two candidates. On TV, he abandoned his abrupt and slashing style, and spoke quietly about guiding the country "out of the blind alley into which this coalition government has led us." This week in Wiesbaden, Barzel and other party strategists will gather to draw up a platform that will hammer hard on the Christian Democrats' main--and almost only--issue: inflation.

A powerful ally in Barzel's campaign may be Karl Schiller, Brandt's brilliant but autocratic former Economics Minister, who bolted from the Chancellor's coalition last summer in a dispute over budget cuts and Brandt's insistence that the flow of foreign currencies into Germany be controlled to protect the mark. Schiller plans to campaign for the C.D.U.

To charges that his government is responsible for inflation, Brandt replies that prices are rising throughout the Common Market. Barzel insists that West Germany's inflation is homegrown. The issue was most clearly set out by Economics Minister Helmut Schmidt when he declared that 5% inflation is better than 5% unemployment (unemployment in West Germany is now 0.9%). Barzel dismisses that as "not a serious approach to discussion." He argues that the C.D.U. achieved stable prices and full employment simultaneously when it was in power.

Barzel's posters stress the theme "We build progress on stability." So far the C.D.U. leader has not revealed what he would do about inflation, beyond limiting government spending. He instead appears to be relying on the reputation of his party for prudent management. But Barzel's election could conceivably fuel a new round of price increases, since West Germany's unions, which have been remarkably restrained under Social Democrat Brandt, would feel no obligation to temper their demands if Barzel was in power.

Below the surface issues the contest has an emotional, ideological edge --Barzel blames Brandt's Social Democrats for "permissiveness" and points with well-rehearsed alarm at neo-Marxist members of Jusos (for Jungsozialisten), the under-35 wing of Brandt's party. The Jusos have swung so far left that the Chancellor himself recently admonished them for "polemics against the majority opinion of the party."

Barzel hopes to enlarge C.D.U.'s traditional bloc of businessmen, white-collar workers, farmers, women and older voters by suggesting that West Germany, between radicalism and Ostpolitik, is edging much too close to socialism. Franz Josef Strauss, a florid speechmaker and political infighter, already warns darkly against what he calls Brandt's "social Communist regime."

Of the two candidates, Brandt is the unspoken favorite of both Washington and Moscow. The U.S. had initial misgivings about Brandt's approaches to the Soviet Union, but is now committed to his Ostpolitik and would like to see him carry on. So would the Soviets and East Germans. In a gesture obviously aimed at giving the Chancellor a boost--by pointing up the benefits of detente--the East Germans last week began giving "instant" or same-day passes to West Berliners who want to visit the eastern half of the divided city.

Barzel and the Christian Democrats would obviously like to ignore Ostpolitik as an issue if they could, and Barzel has made it plain that if he wins, he would not try to reverse Brandt's foreign policy accomplishments. As if to allay any doubts, the opposition leader pledged last week that he did not intend to alter whatever is "legally in force." He even staked a claim for possible Ostpolitiking of his own. "Those in authority in Moscow, Warsaw and East Berlin," he said, "would talk to us if it were in their interest."

The great fear on both sides is that the election might wind up in a draw --leaving the parties right back where they started. Early polls give the Socialists from 46% to 49% of the vote, not enough for them to govern again without the Free Democrats--whose support ranges from 5% to 7%--but enough to restore Brandt's coalition to power. The polls, however, were taken before Brandt's no-confidence vote. At least 15% of the electorate is estimated to be uncommitted. Among them are some of the 2,000,000 or so 18-to 21-year-olds who in West Germany, as in the U.S., will be voting this fall for the first time. The campaign promises to be so closely fought that a single stumble by either Chancellor or challenger could easily determine who speaks for West Germany for the next four years and possibly for the rest of the decade.

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