Hope, Anxiety Mark Election in E. Germany

With a mixture of hope and anxiety, East Germans today elect their first freely chosen government in nearly 60 years.

At stake is nothing less than the pace and form of German unification, an event that will transform the balance of power in Europe.

“It is the start of a new destiny,” commented a ranking Western diplomat here. “It is the final public demise of the old system.”

The election also marks the dawn of unfettered electoral democracy for the more than 100 million citizens of the Soviet Union’s former satellite empire of Eastern Europe.

Hungary will hold its first free national election in 40 years next Sunday, while elections in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania are scheduled to follow this year.

None of those, however, will carry the significance of today’s vote in East Germany.

“The (East German) voters are not only deciding about their own destiny but also about the soundness of the European home, in which we all want to live in equality and without fear of one another,” West German President Richard von Weizsaecker said in an interview published in today’s edition of the mass-circulation paper Bild am Sonntag.

The 400-member Parliament that East Germans elect will form a government with the curious mandate of dissolving itself into a unified greater Germany.

In the process, however, it must negotiate myriad key unification-linked issues, including a currency union with West Germany.

It must restore confidence in a population that still leaves the country at a rate of 2,000 per day, prepare a climate favorable for immediate industrial renewal and preside over the corruption trials of Communist leaders, including former party boss Erich Honecker.

Today’s vote follows a campaign dominated by a single issue: how the two Germanys should unify.

The overwhelming role of West German political parties and personalities in the debate indicated that, at one level, unification is already a fact.

On election eve, a moderately right-wing three-party coalition backed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s West German Christian Democrats was contending as a front-runner with a recently revived Social Democratic Party, supported with equal zeal by its West German counterpart.

Few analysts expect either group to win a clear majority, and the prospect of a broad coalition is considered a likely result.

An opinion poll published last week by the West German group INFAS indicated a slight lead for the Social Democrats. But with nearly half of those questioned still undecided and the accuracy of polling in East Germany completely untested, the race was considered wide open.

The rightist coalition, with personal appearances by Kohl, has drawn huge, enthusiastic crowds during the final days of the campaign. The crowds responded warmly to the coalition’s call for free enterprise and swift unification based mainly on accepting existing West German law.

However, it was badly stung last Wednesday when one of its leading candidates, Wolfgang Schnur, was forced to resign after admitting that he had worked for the neo-Stalinist secret police during the Communist era.

Schnur’s admission further unsettled an electorate already worried by a future filled with question marks, yet hopeful that it may one day share an affluence similar to that in West Germany.

“It tests the limits of the imagination to believe such a thing could happen,” said Stephan Bertheau, a spokesman for the East German Christian Democrats.

The Social Democrats, who have emphasized social benefits and argued for a more measured, carefully negotiated unity based on a new constitution, have seemed to struggle in recent days.

The inevitable move toward unification, coupled with the heavy involvement of the main West German parties in the campaign, makes the eventual outcome here a potential influence on crucial West German elections later this year.

In all, East Germany’s 12.2 million voters will choose from a list of 24 parties ranging from the once all-powerful Communists to a beer drinkers union running on a platform to lift the total ban on drinking before driving.

The opposition group New Forum, which led the country’s revolution in the streets last fall and seemed at the time to be a potential major political force, has run an ill-organized, under-financed campaign with no help from the West and is likely to win only 1% or 2% of the popular vote.

By contrast, the discredited Communists that New Forum helped topple have managed a revival of sorts.

By changing their name (to Democratic Socialists) and running a light, quip-a-minute campaign built around their clever, fast-talking party leader, Gregor Gysi, some observers believe that the Communists could attain as much as 15% of the vote.

Of all the participants, the Communists are expected to gain most from any backlash against what some see as the intrusion of West German parties.

Their goal, not to win but to become only a credible opposition, is also pitched to reassure a people who lived so long under Communist tyranny.

An unexpectedly high vote for the Communists could be seriously destabilizing, analysts believe, carrying with it the danger of accelerating the exodus of East Germans to the West that deeply worries officials in both Germanys.

The urgent need to restore public confidence and stem this flow of people led authorities to advance the parliamentary elections to today from the originally planned date of May 6.

The new date has placed enormous strains on a nation that has been a dictatorship for all but the past few months of its 40-year history.

The election is being conducted under a law less than four weeks old, while parties and candidates were only officially approved nine days ago.

Revelations of massive fraud in last May’s local elections on top of years of fixed results in one-party Communist elections have left such a bad odor on the electoral process in East Germany that officials were forced to make repeated public appeals to enlist the necessary 150,000 polling station observers.

“It’s been a stressful time,” said Hans-Andreas Schoenfeld, an election commission spokesman.

Radio and television programs have featured phone-ins, where voter questions are clarified.

The area that is now East Germany had its last free election in November, 1932. (In that election, a demoralized, disillusioned electorate gave Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party a plurality of 33.1%.)

An East German radio commentator reminded voters that during the Weimar Republic, people often had to wait several hours to vote and that some should consider voting in the afternoon.

In the Communist era, compulsory voting consisted only of folding an already marked ballot and placing it in the ballot box--an exercise derisively called “going folding.”

Those who had not voted by midday were quickly visited by authorities.

The only thing worse than voting late, East Germans say, was to request the privacy of a voting booth, an act of clear defiance, since it was seen as signaling an intention to alter the ballot.

Today, authorities have stressed that the voting booth is mandatory.

Whatever the results, today’s elections constitute an important watershed.

“The people might not like what they see,” a Western diplomat commented, “but at least they will have spoken.”