Trouble Brewing

Helmut faces home-town woes

Only four days before he served as host to the NATO summit meeting in Bonn last week, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was undercut by a local election setback that reinforced doubts about the survival of his coalition government. After more than two decades of rule in the Chancellor's home town of Hamburg, his Social Democratic Party lost control of the city-state's legislature. Unwisely, perhaps, Schmidt had played a prominent role in the campaign. To underline the personal link between the Hamburg race and the head of the federal government, the local branch of the Social Democrats had plastered the city with posters pleading: "Hamburg, don't leave Helmut in the lurch." Well, it did. Schmidt's party slumped from its 1978 showing of 51.5% to 42.7% of the vote. For the first time ever, the opposition Christian Democratic Union emerged as Hamburg's strongest party, with 43.2% of the vote.

The most direct damage to Schmidt's political fortunes was inflicted by an alliance formed especially for this election between the Greens, an environmentalist left-wing fringe group opposed to the government's nuclear-energy and defense policies, and smaller similar movements, known as the Alternative List.

Continuing a string of local and regional electoral successes, the Greens-Alternative List picked up 7.7% of the vote. Hamburg's thus became the fifth of West Germany's ten state parliaments in which the Greens hold seats. Worse, from Schmidt's point of view, was the poor showing of the Free Democratic Party, the Social Democrats' coalition partner: with only 4.8% of the vote, the Free Democrats failed to reach the 5% needed to qualify for seats in the Hamburg legislature. While the Social Democrats have been losing followers throughout the country, especially among disenchanted youth, and mostly to the Greens, the Free Democrats are now in danger of being edged out of their traditional place as the pivotal party positioned between the country's two political heavyweights.

Demoralized by a succession of reversals in recent months, the Free Democratic Party could be tempted to defect from its partnership in the federal government with the Social Democrats and go into alliance with the Christian Democrats, also leaving Schmidt in the lurch. Already, in preparing for next September's election in the state of Hesse, the Free Democrats are actively considering running in partnership with the Christian Democrats. Meanwhile, the Hamburg election has left the city-state without a government, since neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian Democrats have a majority, and neither group is eager to form an alliance with the Greens-Alternative List. -

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