SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

NIGEL LAWSON

Thoughtful Germans have never taken parlia- mentary democracy for granted. Although the present experiment has lasted longer and been infinitely more successful than the thirteen wasted years of the Weimar republic, they've always been well aware of the shallow roots of a way of life that is the product neither of evolution nor of indigenous revolution, but an alien creed imposed by the occupying powers after the war. They have always suspected, too, that the mass of the German people are fair- weather democrats: prepared to embrace par- liamentary democracy while it brings prosper- ity, and ready to desert it should unemploy- ment or recession reappear. But, after revisit- ing Germany this week, I can recall no time when anxiety on this score has been more pronounced than it is—with reason—today.

What Attlee did

There is, first, the phenomenon of the rise of the NPD, the new nazi party. When the NPD first came to prominence with its successes in local elections two years ago the pundits were agreed on cause and cure alike. Germany was going through its first economic crisis since the eco- nomic miracle had begun, while the architect of that miracle now headed a weak and vacil- lating government and what had once again become the strongest industrial power in Europe was acting like the humblest satrapy of the United States. There would have to be a new Chancellor and a governMent strong enough to end the economic crisis, forge a distinctive foreign policy and pass a new elec- toral law a Panglaise that would keep small parties like the NPD out of the Bundestag. And so in December 1966 the grand coalition of the two big parties, the conservative CDU and the socialist SPD, was duly formed; Erhard gave way to the telegenic Kiesinger; the economic crisis was soon overcome; and a foreign policy midway between those of Paris and Washing- ton was launched.

Instead of fading away, however, the NPD has continued to prosper. For the grand coali- tion left in official opposition only the tiny and deeply divided liberal party, the FDP—a hope- lessly inadequate outlet for anti-government feeling in the country; while the formation of the coalition itself seemed a tacit admission that classical parliamentary democracy had failed. And now the SPD, frightened that the party would lose by it, has blocked the in- tended electoral reform. In the general election due in September of next year it seems in- evitable that the NPD will get more than the minimum 5 per cent of the total poll needed to qualify for representation in the Bundestag. Ironically, the Germans had wanted imme- diately after the war to adopt the British simple majority constituency system, which would have kept the new nazis out; but the Attlee govern- ment, at the behest of their SPD friends who feared, then as now, that the CDU would be the principal beneficiaries of this, insisted on a large measure of proportional representation instead.

Student power

Growing even faster than the NPD is the new extremist left, an essentially student movement with its spearhead in the Free University of west Berlin. A German student is a rather different person from his English counterpart. For one thing, he is considerably older. He probably enters university aged between twenty and twenty-one, and doesn't leave it until he ;s twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Indeed, he needn't leave it at all if he doesn't want to: a recent court case established that a university can only send down a student who has failed in an exami- nation, and he may defer taking any examina- tion for as long as he wishes. The experienced full-time student political organiser is inevitably a recognised feature of university life. More- over, any university is forced to accept anyone who has acquired a school-leaving certificate and applies for entry. This means hopeless over- crowding, poor tuition and frustration at any popular university. And Berlin is particularly popular, not least because residents of Berlin are exempted from the otherwise compulsory period of military service.

But the students have genuine complaints apart from the overcrowding and poor con- ditions. They resent the way in which the two

big parties maintain a conspiracy of silence on major issues: there hasn't been a single Bundes- tag debate on Vietnam, and (while, in private, German attitudes have been melting fast) there is no public discussion of the case for recog- nising East Germany or the Oder-Neisse line. They look for idealism in Bonn and find only the compromises endemic to coalition. They see that the government is supported by the vast majority of the press—at whose core is the huge Springer empire, too powerful for even the grand coalition to cut it down to size, which controls over 40 per cent of all German news- paper sales and some 70 per cent in Berlin, and which runs an anti-student policy based on suppressing such news as is unfavourable to its case. America, the bastion of western liberal capitalism and Germany's principal ally, which to them once meant President Kennedy, now only means Vietnam.

Das System

The deficiencies the students see are real enough. But they make the traditional German intellectual's error of judging reality not against any practical alternative, but against their idea of perfection. And their conclusion—ominously echoing the nazis in the last days of Weimar— is that what has failed is Was System': liberal parliamentary democracy.

The turning point came last summer, when,

after a student demonstration, a trigger-happy Berlin policeman shot dead a young man who had not even taken part in the affair. The students look now for a lead and a model not to Bonn, Washington, London or Paris but to Prague, hoping to see there a living proof that socialism and freedom are not incompatible.

But they have meanwhile been captured by a leadership whose ideology is a second-hand farrago of Mao and Clad Guevara, whose avowed enemy is liberalism in any shape or form, whose language is that of violence and whose guiding spirit is irrationalism. The left wing student movement still involves only a minority of German students, but it has already probably killed the political career of Willy Brandt's successor as Mayor of Berlin, the promising Klaus Schutz, and has become as important a force in German politics today as the new nazis, as traditional and as dan- gerous.

Prospects for 1969

The widely voiced concern among respon- sible Germans at the disquieting political de- velopments of the past year or two is, in its way, itself a reassuring sign. But, so long as that travesty of parliamentary democracy, the so-called grand coalition, remains, so long will the extremes flourish and German liberal demo- cracy be in peril. To do them justice, neither the cpu nor the SPD wants to continue the coalition beyond next year's elections. It is almost falling apart already, as last week's resignation of Herr Lficke, the Minister for the Interior, underlined. But I see a real danger of the 1969 elections returning the CDU as the largest single party but without an overall majority, and the liberals (unlike the NPD) fail- ing to secure the 5 per cent needed for any representation at all. In which case, like it or not, the grand coalition will be forced to soldier on, with the new nazis as the only parliamentary opposition—an even worse situation than the present. Then Attlee will really have something to answer for at the bar of history.