Skirmishes over the Nuclear Issue

By Henry Muller

Schmidt wins a battle, but not the war, against his party's left

The setting seemed strangely antiseptic for an occasion so potentially fraught with drama. For its first national congress in more than two years, West Germany's ruling Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.) had gathered in a cavernous 15,000-seat sports arena built for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. As Chancellor Helmut Schmidt addressed the 440 party delegates and the 1,000 observers present at the event, he faced a sea of unoccupied seats, and his voice echoed through the near empty hall, so distorted by bad acoustics that many in his audience barely understood him.

High on the conference agenda was possibly the most divisive issue the Social Democrats have faced in their 13 years in office: whether or not to continue support for a 1979 NATO decision to install 572 U.S.-built nuclear-armed Pershing II and cruise missiles in five Western European countries, including West Germany, beginning in late 1983. The decision was coupled with a demand that the U.S. and the Soviet Union open negotiations aimed at reducing the number of atomic weapons based in Europe. Last May, just as the Western European antimissile movement began gaming strength, the Chancellor had threatened to resign if left-wing party members succeeded in withdrawing the S.P.D.'s backing for NATO's Doppelbeschluss, or two-track decision.

As his supporters had predicted, Schmidt carried the day. Delegates declared their preference by raising red voting cards, but no count was considered necessary because Schmidt had clearly received a majority of roughly 2 to 1. Yet it was an oddly hollow victory in a congress that failed to lift the party out of its deep-seated doldrums. Although Schmidt's coalition of Social Democrats and the Free Democratic Party was reelected with a handsome majority of 45 seats only 19 months ago, it has been in steady decline since then.

Not only is the Social Democratic Party rived internally over Schmidt's nuclear-defense policy, but it has increasingly been unable to agree with its junior partners, the business-oriented Free Democrats, on how to finance an economic policy that would reduce West Germany's 8% unemployment rate, the highest in 30 years.To strengthen his position, Schmidt last week was preparing to reshuffle several key portfolios in his Cabinet.At the same time, Bonn's relations with Washington have been strained as the result of what the Reagan Administration sees as an insufficiently firm attitude toward Moscow. One oft cited example is Bonn's lack of support for economic sanctions against the Soviet Union in the wake of General Wojciech Jaruzelski's declaration of martial law in Poland.

Reflecting this sense of drift, the Social Democrats suffered a severe setback in state elections in Lower Saxony last March. Their vote fell from 42.2% in 1978, to 35.5%, the party's worst showing in the state in more than two decades and a defeat that had more to do with the S.P.D.'s national image than with local issues. Said Helmut Kohl, the man who would most likely replace Schmidt as Chancellor if the opposition Christian Democrats came to power: "The real loser is Chancellor Helmut Schmidt." In West Germany, moreover, state elections are important not just because they reflect the popular mood. The Bonn parliament's Bundesrat, or upper chamber, consists of 45 voting members appointed by state governments. At present, the Christian Democrats have 26 members in the Bundesrat; if they should defeat the S.P.D. in Hesse next September, the opposition could gain a two-thirds majority. Such a breakthrough would enable the Christian Democrats to block all federal legislation, thus putting Schmidt in the awkward position of having either to seek his opposition's consent to govern or resign. Recent polls show that nationwide support for the S.P.D. has dropped to 31%, compared with the 42.9% it won in 1980. Says Martin Hillenbrand, director general of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs and a former U.S. Ambassador to West Germany: "You have the feeling that the end of a political cycle has arrived."

Hoping to sidetrack the nuclear issue, the S.P.D.'s leadership introduced a resolution at the conference last week to postpone a final decision on the new weapons until a special party congress that will be held in late 1983. The objective was to allow time for the U.S.-Soviet negotiations that began in Geneva last November to produce some results. Schmidt's left-wing opponents pinned their hopes on two countermotions. One called on the party to reject the new missiles altogether; the other, supported by Erhard Eppler, 55, the bearded former Bundestag deputy who has been Schmidt's most vocal critic within the S.P.D., demanded an immediate moratorium on the deployment of new nuclear missiles.

In his two-hour speech to the congress, Schmidt argued that a moratorium would undermine the Geneva talks. He explained that the very aim of deploying the new NATO weapons was to persuade the Soviets to dismantle their 300 mobile SS-20 missile launchers now targeted on Western Europe. "The negotiations can be successful only if Moscow expects the deployment of American weapons in Western Europe at the end of 1983," the Chancellor said. "What reason could the Soviet Union have otherwise to negotiate seriously?" Schmidt rejected the argument, often made by members of West Germany's antinuclear movement, that a unilateral gesture toward arms reduction would ease East-West tensions. Said he: "Historical experience shows that one-sided powerlessness never stopped aggression by a force possessing power. This is the experience of neighbors of the Soviet Union. The same was true of states neighboring Hitler's dictatorship."

Schmidt received the somewhat ambivalent backing of Willy Brandt, 68, who has remained party chairman since his forced resignation as Chancellor in 1974. Brandt backed Schmidt's policy but described the new missiles as a "mechanism that puts pressure on both sides"--implying that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are equally responsible for the arms race. Schmidt made a clearer statement. "Our position is irrevocably anchored in the West," he declared. "[West] German poli cy may not and can never be made from a position equidistant between Washington and Moscow. We stand on this side, on the side of free and equal peoples."

The Chancellor's opponents had come to Munich armed with 19 amendments and resolutions aimed at blocking the NATO decision and voted by local party chapters in recent weeks. The resolutions, however, did not reflect grass-roots sentiment all that accurately: many of them had been voted by party intellectuals late at night, after the working-class members who form the Social Democrats' backbone had gone home. In Munich the intellectuals were in the minority. In the low-key debate that preceded the vote, Senator Edward Kennedy's support for a U.S. nuclear freeze was cited as an indication of growing American backing for a similar halt to the arms buildup in Western Europe. Eppler and other advocates of the moratorium claimed to have Kennedy's support. But Peter Corterier, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and a political intimate of Schmidt's, promptly took the stand to call the claim a "complete misrepresentation" of the U.S. Senator's position. Corterier explained that Kennedy favors a bilateral moratorium with proper safeguards, and not the unilateral freeze advocated by the S.P.D. left.

After more than four hours of debate, both resolutions were voted down. Yet the left wing took its defeat in stride, convinced that time is on its side now that a strong antinuclear movement, similar to Western Europe's, has emerged in the U.S. Egon Bahr, a disarmament specialist who has voiced strong reservations about the NATO decision, declared that if the Reagan Administration was willing to consider the wishes of an antinuclear movement at home, it should do the same in West Germany.

Equally important, the left wing managed to affirm its strength in the party at the Munich congress. Most of Schmidt's critics, including Eppler, were re-elected to the S.P.D. executive committee, some with more votes than they had won in 1979. Schmidt, who is also the party's first vice chairman, received less support than Johannes Rau, 51, the Minister President (governor) of North Rhine-Westphalia, who serves as second vice chairman. For the embattled Chancellor, it was a clear signal that his opponents would hold their ground on the nuclear issue. Whether any new missiles are ever installed in West Germany will depend not only on the outcome of the negotiations now under way in Geneva, but on Schmidt's ability to state his case to the numerous skeptics within his own party.

-- By Henry Muller. Reported by Roland Flamini/Munich

With reporting by Roland Flamini

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