Brandt Resigns as Bonn Party Leader in Controversy Over Greek Spokeswoman

Willy Brandt resigned unexpectedly Monday as chairman of West Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party in the climax to a controversy over the appointment of a party spokeswoman.

Hans-Jochen Vogel, the party’s parliamentary leader, was named late Monday by the party presidium to succeed him.

Brandt’s resignation appeared to end the active political career of one of West Germany’s best known post-World War II statesman, a man who has been mayor of West Berlin, chancellor of the Federal Republic and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now 73, Brandt had been scheduled to step down next year as chairman of the party, which suffered its worst defeat in 25 years in national elections Jan. 25. Yet his decision to retire immediately came as a surprise to political observers, although he had come under heavy critical fire from senior party officials last week when he pushed through the party presidium the nomination of his personal choice for the post of official spokeswoman for the Social Democrats.

The nominee, 31-year-old Margarita Mathiopoulos, is a public relations official with IBM in West Germany and is said to be a good friend of Brandt’s wife, Brigitte. Fueling criticism of Brandt for her nomination was the fact that, while Mathiopoulos was born in Bonn of Greek parents, she is neither a West German citizen nor a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Under Fire from Moderates

Earlier Monday, Mathiopoulos announced that she was withdrawing her name from consideration. Her nomination had not yet been confirmed by the party executive committee.

Even without the furor over Mathiopoulos, Brandt had been under fire from moderate party leaders since January’s election debacle for having given only lukewarm support to the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor, Johannes Rau, the moderate premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The moderates charged that Brandt was steering the party too far leftward and that it could thus be doomed to stay in permanent opposition.

Rau himself said after his election defeat that he did not wish to become party chairman.

In naming Vogel to succeed Brandt, the presidium picked a moderate who campaigned unsuccessfully for the post of chancellor against Helmut Kohl in the elections of 1983.

Anti-NATO Advocate

The choice of Vogel temporarily sidetracked the ambitions of Oskar Lafontaine, premier of the state of Saarland and the leader of the party’s left wing. Lafontaine has advocated taking West Germany out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and cooperating in government with the Greens, a radical environmental party.

One of the more colorful and controversial figures in the annals of West German politics, Brandt had been Social Democratic chairman since 1964.

A ruddy, stocky man, Brandt fled Hitler’s Germany to Norway, returning as a Norwegian journalist to cover the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. He served as Norwegian press attache in Berlin before assuming West German citizenship in 1948. The Nazis had stripped him of his German citizenship.

In 1957, he became mayor of West Berlin, and he held the post when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

During the so-called Grand Coalition government of Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, Brandt served as foreign minister and began his famous policy of ostpolitik-- that is, detente with the Communist-ruled nations of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union.

Continued Detente Policy

He was elected chancellor in the Social Democrat victory of 1969, continuing his policy of detente, which acknowledged the postwar divisions of Europe. While German reunification remains the official policy of the Bonn government, ostpolitik holds that the goal can be achieved only through what it calls the elimination of East-West divisions in Europe.

Brandt signed a treaty with Warsaw that in effect recognized postwar Polish borders that included prewar German territory. While on a visit to Warsaw, Brandt knelt bareheaded before a monument to the victims of Nazi aggression.

In 1971, he was instrumental in gaining the agreement by which the Soviet Union, in a new accord with the Western allies, recognized West Berlin’s ties with West Germany, effectively ending the tension over that beleaguered outpost of democracy.

He was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts to bridge the differences between East and West.

But in 1974, his close aide, Gunther Guillaume, was discovered to be a spy for the East Germans, and Brandt resigned as chancellor, being succeeded by Helmut Schmidt.

Brandt remained active in politics and was a chairman of the North-South Commission, an international body that researched the disparities between rich and poor nations, which became known as the Brandt Commission.