Brandt in Trouble

Only a year ago, the Times of London wrote about Willy Brandt: "It is almost inconceivable that he would not be elected President of Europe against any competition." Brandt had just won a decisive re-election victory, and his Social Democrats were widely expected to stay in power for another decade at least. Today the West German Chancellor clearly finds his job so frustrating that he would welcome a way to renounce it with grace.

Like Gulliver, Brandt is entangled in a network of Lilliputian political problems, and they are crippling his leadership. Amid the portents of disaster --or rather above them, which is part of the problem --stands the Nobel Peace prizewinner, usually silent, often indecisive. His personality has always been elusive, and associates say that it is becoming more so. He wants to be liked, and so he avoids personal confrontation.He remains aloof from battles or postpones dealing with them until they balloon out of all proportion to their basic importance. To those around him, he increasingly gives the impression of a man who is tired and bored, as if the frustrations of domestic politics are too much to bear after the heady sweep of his foreign policy successes.

Even Brandt's major achievement, Ostpolitik, which opened West Germany's dialogues with Eastern Europe, is now under criticism as being more theater than substance. Instead of his promised increase in the exchange of people and ideas between the two Germanys, there has been a crackdown by East Germany's Communist rulers on contacts with the West.

Brandt's Social Democratic Party is in poor shape, riven by conflicts between the radical young socialists (JUSOS) and the party establishment (TIME, April 23, 1973). The JUSOS frighten voters with their intemperate Marxist rhetoric. They dominate local meetings with their aggressive harangues, and they control the party organizations in Munich and Frankfurt.

Fed up with Brandt's failure to curb the JUSOS, his longtime lieutenant, Herbert Wehner, 67, resigned last year as deputy chairman of the party. The two men hardly speak now. Nevertheless, Wehner has just been re-elected floor leader by his colleagues in the Bundestag. However, it is the continuing opposition of Brandt's coalition partners, the Free Democrats, that is largely responsible for his failure to move forward with promised social reforms. The Free Democrats, who hold veto power over all legislation, are locked in an ideological debate with Brandt over how far to go in giving West German labor unions real power in the economy. The result: a spreading public impression of government impotence. In a public opinion poll released last week, the S.P.D. registered a new low of 33% approval, down 15% from a year ago.

Moody Inaction. Brandt also faces a potentially powerful backlash from the faltering West German economy, once the miracle of Europe. The inflation rate has reached 8% yearly, which by conservative German standards is frightening. Unemployment has risen from 331,800 last November to 485,000 in December. The automobile and chemical industries are in their worst decline since the recession of 1966-67.

Even Novelist Guenter Grass, a good friend of Brandt's, now criticizes: "Whoever, like me, helped campaign for Brandt now sees in Bonn a lack of political energy and too much internal party bickering. There seems to be no serious will to finish the work of reform. Disgusted, Brandt has fallen once again into foreign policy."

Despite his troubles, Brandt is secure until 1976, when West Germany holds its next elections. He had pledged to resolve his differences with rival politicians by the end of 1973 so that he could get cracking on domestic issues. But New Year's Day came and went without a solution and without a word from Brandt. Germans worry that such moody inaction could be a portent for the next three years.

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