Victory with Reservations

Five weeks after his landslide victory in the general election, Konrad Adenauer last week was re-elected Chancellor for a new four-year term, by a Bundestag vote of 304 to 148. His 156-vote majority gives Adenauer one of the strongest parliamentary mandates of any leader in Western Europe.

Yet, impressive as his victory was, it fell short of the two-thirds majority he counted on: two Deputies among his supporters opposed him, and 14 others of them abstained. Behind this unexpected opposition lay a curious fact: the very size of Adenauer's success worries many Germans who were glad he had won. They wonder whether their democracy, still young and fragile, can risk putting too much power in one man's hands, even Adenauer's. And they found cause for grievance in some recent autocratic Adenauer actions: P: He let it be known that Germany's combined labor union movement (DGB) should reorganize itself because, in his opinion, it had violated its constitutional neutrality in favoring a Socialist victory. P: He supported State Secretary Otto Lenz's scheme for a new Ministry of Information, backed down only after the press fiercely attacked it as too reminiscent of Goebbelsism. P:He indicated that he would reward Opportunist Waldemar Kraft's new BHE (Refugee Party) with one or two Cabinet jobs if it "behaved properly." With Kraft's support, Adenauer would have a two-thirds Bundestag majority, enabling him to change the constitution if need be. All these proposals would cause little alarm in a well-established two-party system. But though the opposition Social Democratic Party has 151 Deputies, it slumbers under the respectable but uninspired leadership of Erich Ollenhauer and Carlo Schmid. Today, the 84-year-old Social Democratic Party, Germany's oldest, is fervently anti-Communist and only faintly Marxist, but it still clings as a matter of tradition to Marxist catch phrases like class struggle and proletarian revolution. It thus scares off middle-class voters.

A new wing of the party, calling itself the Reformists, realizes the danger and is battling the old-guard bureaucrats for control. Reformist Chief Heinrich Al-bertz, a Protestant pastor and minister in the Lower Saxony Cabinet, would junk the old Marxist catch phrases, and pattern the SPD roughly after the British Labor Party. Albertz argues: "We have good ideas; we are on the right road, but we are unable to speak to the people in their own language. The policy of the present party has as little to do with Marxism as Copernicus does to the 20th century."

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