The Last Days of Erhard
From KONRAD AHLERS
HAMBURG
But their present Chancellor and party leader, Ludwig Erhard, is now living not only on pro- bation; he is under suspended sentence. The consensus among the leading figures of the CDU is that Dr Erhard must go by the end of next year, if not earlier, in order to make room for a new man who has some chance of winning the 1969 election.
The CDU is in the position of a football club which knows that it will be relegated to the second division if it does not change the manager and buy new players. There are still some good players in the reserves, like Gerstenmaier, the president of the Bundestag, or Barzel, the chief of the parliamentary group, or Kiesinger, the head of the provincial govern- ment in Baden-Wurttemberg. And, of course, the CDU is willing to buy for a large transfer fee Franz-Josef Strauss, the chief of the Bavarian Christian party. But since players of this class do not like the manager, they do not want to play under him, and since the party cannot yet agree on a replacement, the old manager stays. This at least has one advantage for the reserves: the manager and his present team will have to take the blame for the loss of the next matches. Thus everybody expects the CDU to lose the four provincial elections which will take place within the next six months. After that, the Christian Democrats hope, the tide will turn.
Ludwig Erhard, a stubborn but good-natured man, who likes his whisky and a good football match, does know this. He has his own sense of drama and told this writer some time ago that he is sacrificing- himself for the welfare of the German people. He still thinks that all 4yould be well if he could pursue his path of complete laissez-faire in politics and economics. He points out constantly that under German constitutional law he cannot be thrown out by a simple vote of no confidence, but only if the Bundestag elects a new Chancellor. He believes that only if he shows willing can the party get its new leader.
Yet Dr Erhard acknowledges that he has failed to solve either of the present two crises, the short-term budget one and the long-term political one. The Federal budget is already about 3,000 million marks-short, and the Federal gov- ernment will probably lose another 2,000 million marks because it will have to compromise with the provincial governments about its share of the principal taxes. Under the German Federal con- stitution the provincial governments receive 65 per cent of the income and corporation taxes and the Federal government 35 per cent. In 1964 the provincial governments gave Bonn more money (39 per cent), but only for twa years. Now they want to go back to the old division.
The reason for the financial collapse is that both the Bonn government and the Lander threw away money last year in an effort to please the voters before the Federal elections. Every- body got what they wanted and some what they had not even dreamed of : industry and agri- culture, pensioners and parents and students of all sorts. It was another great leap into a dis- organised welfare state. But the terrible thing about it was that all reasonable people knew at the time that the budget was not large enough to pay for it. Dr Erhard, however, declined to invoke a certain article of the constitution by which he could have stopped it; he wanted to show that he could do better at the polls than his great enemy, Konrad Adenauer.
Now the government and the coalition parties are debating whether to raise taxes or to re- duce the possibilities of tax deductions. They have already stopped the building of new auto- bahns and are trying to get a stabilisation law through the Bundestag which would enable Bonn to control the expenditures of the provincial and local governments. That a country like West Germany is fiscally bankrupt, that Bonn cannot pay its debts and has to ask for a respite in payments of debts to Washington and beg for money from the Bundesbank is a disastrous sign of mismanagement.
the financial crisis has also resulted in stand- ing German foreign policy on its head. For many years Bonn's position was that NATO troops in Germany should not be reduced, both for reasons of security and in order to bring pressure on the Russians. This applied not only to BAOR but more so to the American army in Germany. When Ludwig Erhard was in Washington two weeks ago and was obliged to tell President Johnson that he could do nothing at the present time to offset American expendi- ture, he had to agree to the formation of a com- mittee which will try to solve this problem by an agreed reduction of these troops over a period of some years. He had to agree further to the President's policy of appeasing Moscow, which is contrary to everything Bonn has thought on the subject in the past. The CDU still publicly maintains that there should be no deal with the Russians without some moves on the German question in return. And, last but not least, Dr Erhard himself had to dig the grave for any multilateral force. and be content instead with the software solution of nuclear sharing within the advisory McNamara committee.
It is easy to imagine that this total capitula- tion has stirred up more unrest among the rank and file of the Christian Democrats than even the unfavourable Gallup Polls. There is these days a large shadow of resignation over Bonn. Of course, Dr Erhard is not the guilty one, but only the executor of events for which he is not responsible. On the other hand, no one be- lieves that the Chancellor is the sort of man capable of defining a new place for Germany within a changing international situation, and setting a new course for German foreign policy.
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