Word: barzel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Barzel hopes to enlarge C.D.U.'s traditional bloc of businessmen, white-collar workers, farmers, women and older voters by suggesting that West Germany, between radicalism and Ostpolitik, is edging much too close to socialism. Franz Josef Strauss, a florid speechmaker and political infighter, already warns darkly against what he calls Brandt's "social Communist regime...
...Barzel and the Christian Democrats would obviously like to ignore Ostpolitik as an issue if they could, and Barzel has made it plain that if he wins, he would not try to reverse Brandt's foreign policy accomplishments. As if to allay any doubts, the opposition leader pledged last week that he did not intend to alter whatever is "legally in force." He even staked a claim for possible Ostpolitiking of his own. "Those in authority in Moscow, Warsaw and East Berlin," he said, "would talk to us if it were in their interest...
...politician in West Germany's postwar history has risen so fast and made so few admirers in the process as Rainer Candidus Barzel. He is almost all a politician should be: intelligent, hardworking, cool under pressure, a first-rate tactician and gifted debater. Yet Barzel suffers from a serious image problem. In voter preference polls, he badly trails the warmer and more personable Brandt, and even rates below some members of his own party. His critics have pinned on him a wide assortment of unlovely epithets: "aalglatt" (slippery as an eel), "a well-rehearsed Pharisee," "spontaneous as a robot...
Perhaps the kindest cut is that Barzel's image has been compared with that of both Lyndon Johnson, as a behind-the-scenes manipulator, and Richard Nixon, as an ambitious opportunist. Barzel tells his aides that "the people should look at what I have done, not just at my image." Even so he has been trying to improve that image by toning down his speaking style and trying to project himself as a thoughtful, issue-oriented leader...
...Barzel deserves his reputation as a tough and skillful political infighter. The son of a Prussian schoolmaster, the Christian Democratic leader was elected to the Bundestag in 1957 after a short but highly successful career as a civil servant. He quickly became known as the German counterpart of the U.S.'s Communist-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy, reportedly under the influence of his later political partner, Franz Josef Strauss. Barzel founded an anti-Communist organization called "Save Freedom," whose primary activity was a "red book" that accused 453 West German intellectuals and artists of Communist ties. He also asserted that...