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ADENAUER'S COALITION: C.D.U (Christian Democrats) 145 FDP (Free Democrats) 51 DP (German Party) 20 216 AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT: SPD (Socialists) 130 FU (Bavarians and Pacifists) 18 BHE (Refugees) 3 KPD (Communists) 14 Splinter parties 21 186 Most of the opposition "splinter parties" will be massacred at the polls by the "5% rule," which invalidates all groups winning less than that much of the total vote. The Communists are no danger at all: this time they too may fail to get 5%. Unlike other European nations, West Germany has no big Communist Party, for the reality is too near.
Three big groups will cause the Chancellor trouble:
The Socialists (SPD) are West Germany's second largest party. They condemn Adenauer as a U.S. puppet and call him "Chancellor of the Allies"; they reject EDC as likely to delay German unity, but when the chips are down, they stand squarely with the West. The Socialists polled 7,000,000 votes in the 1949 election. This time they hope to do better, yet in their speeches at their rallies, something big is missing. It is the great voice and flashing eye of the late Kurt Schumacher (TIME, June 9, 1952), the only man in postwar Germany who could measure up to Adenauer.
Schumacher's successor is tubby little Erich Ollenhauer. He lacks spark, and his party lacks an issue. Old-fashioned Socialist oratory about class warfare falls on deaf ears in the Germany of today. For a time, German unity looked like a hot issue: all Germans want it, and Adenauer seemed slow about pressing for it. But since the June 17 East German riots, Adenauer's contemptuous and firm treatment of the Russians has proven good politics.
The Refugees. One West German in five is a refugee. To politicians in a campaign year, the refugee vote is an irresistible temptation to demagoguery. There are more than 10 million refugees, expelled from Communist Eastern Europe in three great waves. The advancing Red army chased 650,000 from East Prussia and Mecklenburg; most of them settled in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, which has become known as the "poorhouse of Germany." Next came the 8,000,000 Volksdeutsche (German ethnic groups) expelled from Eastern Europe. The last wave started when two million hungry East Germans began fleeing across the border.
The refugees live like animals, when and where they can. Konrad Adenauer confesses that "the task of integrating them into a tightly populated area, to see that they get employment, not to let them degenerate and waste away, to care for their young people, to make useful citizens of them—that task reaches out beyond our capacities."
Every German party is wooing them, but one excels all the rest. The All-German Bloc (BHE) began as the League of Expellees and Victims of Injustice. Today it is the private political vehicle of a Polish-born, ex-SS captain named Waldemar Kraft. In the refugee-laden farm steads near the Danish border, Kraft's name is magic. In 1950 he ran up 23% of the vote in local elections in Schleswig-Holstein. BHE might win 40 to 50 seats in the Bundestag.
BHE will sell its support to the highest bidder. Conceivably it could provide the Socialists with enough extra seats to enable them to govern. Germans call the BHE the "wild card in the pack." It is the party to watch.