Eyes Right

Election day was warm and sunny. Near polling booths in bars and cafes beer flowed as on a special holiday. High on the Zugspitze vacationers took time to vote, and from Baltic beaches bathers ambled inland to cast their ballots. "It does not really make much difference who wins," said a German in Marburg, "as long as there is a big turnout."

The turnout was hearteningly big. Nearly 80% of West Germany's voters went to the polls. When all the ballots were counted, Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats were ahead with 7,357,579 votes and 139 out of 402 seats in the Bundestag. Kurt Schumacher's Socialists got 6,932,272 votes, 131 seats. The vote meant strong support for the Christian Democrats' free-enterprising ideas, a sharp swing to the right.

A Kind Gentleman. In the homestretch, the campaign had been spotted with Zwischenfaelle (incidents). A tear-gas bomb drove Communist Max Reimann from his rostrum; bullets breezed past Socialists in the Ruhr. Some swastikas appeared, some Sieg Heils resounded.

But the major party leaders tempered their tone. Socialist Kurt Schumacher expressed "appreciation that the Allies, especially the Anglo-Saxons, have made serious efforts to help Germany." Socialists, Christian Democrats and Free Democrats agreed that Allied troops and security agencies should stay to prevent Russian aggression, but asked that Allied controls over German affairs be abandoned.

Germans took their first major free election since 1933 with a mixed sense of duty and fatalism. In Fechenheim, near Frankfurt, a worn-looking war widow puzzled over her ballot. An election official told an American bystander: "Under Hitler, the choice was simpler--each ballot had a big Ja and small Nein." A young man said: "The trouble is we do not really know what we are voting for. All the politicians talk about is what is wrong with the other parties and with the Allies. No one tells us how his party can end unemployment, how he can get us houses." The Germans were quick to pick up electioneering tricks. Outside one polling place well-scrubbed German moppets happily clutched colored balloons proclaiming, "Vote for the Socialist Party." Explained one little girl: "Some kind gentleman came up and gave them to us."

A Need for Luck. The group that gained most was the Free Democratic Party, economically to the right of the Christian Democrats and called the "Bankers' Party" by the Socialists; the Free Democrats got 52 seats, trebling their best showing in earlier local contests. The extreme right-wing Deutsche Partei and the hotheaded Bavarian separatist Bayernpartei polled 17 seats each; local and splinter groups, mostly right-wing, gained 32 seats between them. The Communists were soundly beaten (6% of the total vote, 15 seats).

Konrad Adenauer would be the new German Republic's first Chancellor. He will probably form a government next month in coalition with the Free Democrats; whether the Socialists would enter the coalition remained doubtful. As he viewed his victory Adenauer might feel some discomfort in the fact that just 30 years ago Germany launched another hopeful democratic experiment in the ill-fated Weimar Republic. U.S. occupation officers, pleased by the election's outcome, wished Adenauer luck; he would need it.

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