BISMARCK barred them from political life, and Kaiser Wilhelm scourged them as an unpatriotic rabble. Konrad Adenauer, who presided over the rebirth of West Germany, dismissed them as unfit to govern, and for years millions of his countrymen agreed. Last week, in the wake of one of the closest elections in the 20-year history of the Federal Republic, the Social Democrats, long the outcasts of German politics, prepared to take power. Unless the coalition carefully pasted together with the Free Democrats suddenly comes unstuck, Willy Brandt will be sworn in as the Chancellor of West Germany on Oct. 21, thus becoming the first Socialist to lead a German government since 1930.
This was an election that could easily have earned Germany new notoriety in the international community. The right-wing National Democrats of Adolf ("Bubi") von Thadden might have won 5% of the national vote and thereby earned the right to sit in the Bundestag (parliament); in that case, fears of renascent Nazism would have chilled much of the world. As it turned out, the National Democrats were able to draw only 4.3%. Far from becoming a black mark against West Germany's name, the election turned into what could well prove a historic turning point.
It was Brandt's own daring as much as the actual election results that brought the Socialists to the brink of power. Neither of the two major parties won an outright majority. The long dominant Christian Democrats, who had promised "no experiments," remained the largest par ty, with 15.2 million votes or 46.1% of the total—a 1.5% decline from the last election in 1965. The Socialists, who pledged to "Build the Modern Germany," won 14 million votes, increasing their 1965 percentage by 3.4% and capturing 42.7% of the electorate. Ironically, the party that ended up holding the balance of power was the one that had lost the most: the Free Democrats, an unlikely assortment of conservative and far-left liberals, had lost 19 of their 49 seats in the Bundestag, and their share of the total vote dropped from 9.5% in 1965 to a mere 5.8% —just above the 5% required for representation in the Bundestag. After three days of intense negotiations, the Free Democrats, who are led by Walter Scheel, threw their slight but decisive weight behind Brandt. At week's end the onetime outcast of West German politics informed President Gustav Heinemann that he was prepared to form a government in coalition with the Free Democrats and rule the Federal Republic.
Consigned to the Past
It was an auspicious moment for a party that not too long ago seemed irretrievably locked into the role of the opposition, unable to break its blue-collar mold and incapable of attracting much more than one-third of the voters. Throughout the country there was a deep and exciting awareness that a watershed had been reached. After 20 years of uninterrupted rule, Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger's Christian Democrats prepared to take their places on the opposition benches. Said the conservative Bayern Kurier: "The political generation of postwar times finally belongs to the past."
Not unlike the Democrats and Republicans, Germany's two major parties share many fundamental beliefs, including a firm commitment to NATO and a desire f or -British entry into the Common Market. But in style as well as substance, there are