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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MARCH 11, 1983
PAGE 9
WALL STREET JOURNAL, submitted by Josef Joffe, on leave in the U.S. from his
post as senior editor of the West German weekly DIE ZEIT.
Impressive as it was, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's triumph•••is per
haps less dramatic than the devastating defeat of his Social
Democratic (SPD) rivals. Capturing only 38.2% of the vote, the
party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt did worse than in any of
the preceding five elections since 1961.••• The most painful
blows to the SPD were delivered in its traditional strongholds:
the urban, working-class centers. The SPD even lost the state of
Northrhine-Westphalia, its strongest redoubt in the industrial
heartland.
The message seems clear: The "New Majority" that Party Chairman
Brandt saw looming on the left is a chimera•••. It didn't help to
flirt with the anti-growth, anti-industry Greens while trying to
mobilize the SPD's traditional blue-collar battalions among
workers obsessed with snowballing unemployment....
After 13 years at the helm, the Social Democrats lost most heavi
ly among their traditional partisans (almost all the Conservative
gains came from previous SPD voters), and they still failed to
keep the Greens out of parliament by veering sharply to the left.
The SPD's choice for the future is as evident as it is painful.
Unless the party reaffirms its commitment to growth-minded free
enterprise and the Atlantic Alliance--the two pillars of the
country's "unwritten constitution"--it will continue to languish
in opposition for years••••
The voters reaffirmed the country's unregenerate centrism by mak
ing sure that the more extreme conservative tendencies of the
CDU/CSU will be nicely balanced by a strong FOP under Mr.
Genscher's leadership.
A few months ago, the FOP was practical
ly dead--languishing in the two percent to three percent zone of
the opinion polls. Last Sunday, the FOP captured almost seven
percent of the ballots--not because the populace had suddenly re
discovered a love for the Liberals but because they alone repre
sented a vital insurance against Franz-Josef Strauss, the gifted
but unpredictable leader of the Christ1an Democratsr--"aavarian
s"Ister party (the CSU} ••.•
Moscow's Tactics Backfire
As the election drew nigh, West Germans, including even some Social Demo
cratic supporters, became increasingly perturbed over heavy-handed Soviet
meddling in the campaign. A Bonn government spokesman Juergen Sudhoff lam
basted what he called the "massive and hitherto unprecedented manner" of
Soviet interference. He specificall�eferred to an appeal by Soviet For°=
e1gn Minister Andrei A. Gromyko for West European nations to dissociate
themselves from the American position at the Geneva arms limitation talks.
He also mentioned a German-language broadcast on Radio Moscow that pre
dicted social unrest in West Germany if Mr. Kohl won. "The grossness of
this attack was striking," said Mr. Sudhoff of the German-language trans
mission.
"German Showdown: Reagan Sweeps, Andropov Weeps" is another March 10 WALL
STREET JOURNAL headline, over an article written by Morton M. Kondracke,
executive editor of the NEW REPUBLIC magazine: