West Germans Stand Pat

Now that West German voters have handed the ruling center-right coalition a comfortable parliamentary majority for another four years, the losing Social Democrats can get on with the battle that really concerns them: the quarrel over just how radical the party should be.

Despite the stronger-than-ever showing of the Greens, the outcome of Sunday’s elections clearly reaffirmed the preference of most Germans for moderate, centrist government.

Like most elections in most countries, the contest turned more on domestic- than on foreign-policy issues. But the result would seem to reflect general voter satisfaction with how foreign policy is currently being conducted. And West Germany’s posture, despite U.S.-German friction over trade and other issues, is one of strong support for the Atlantic alliance.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union was disappointed that it got only 44.3% of the vote--far fewer than pre-election polls had projected, and the CDU’s worst showing since 1949. But the left-of-center Social Democrats did much worse, falling short of the 38.2% share of the vote that they got in the election disaster of 1983.

Most of the defecting CDU voters obviously went to the moderate Free Democratic Party--the CDU’s coalition partner, which did surprisingly well in the elections. As a result the ruling coalition remains in power with a reduced but still impregnable majority in the Bundestag.

A certain amount of post-election in-fighting is in prospect within the conservative Christian Democratic Party, as well as between the CDU and the Free Democrats. But the real battle will take place among members of the opposition Social Democratic Party. Its left wing, with encouragement from chairman Willy Brandt, wants to preempt the appeal of the Greens to young Germans by removing U.S.-made nuclear missiles, moving toward a more neutralist posture between East and West, and otherwise pursuing “independent” policies that have distinct anti-American overtones. Party moderates have their own criticisms of the Atlantic alliance and American leadership, but believe that the sharp leftward lurch favored by the radicals would be overwhelmingly rejected by the West German electorate.

The United States and other members of the Western alliance obviously would prefer that West Germany’s major opposition party--which behaved well in the past when it was actually in power--remain somewhere near the middle of the road, where elections in healthy democracies are usually won. Unfortunately, those who want the party to become an organ of left-wing neutralism seem to be in ascendance. For them to prevail would be bad news for the alliance and possibly for West German democracy.