Word: bundestag
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West Germany, the country most immediately and strongly affected, was both overjoyed and stunned. In Bonn members of the Bundestag, some with tears in their eyes, spontaneously rose and sang the national anthem. It was a rare demonstration in a country in which open displays of nationalistic sentiment have been frowned on since the Third Reich died...
...Party, a tiny far-right grouping founded in 1983 and headed by a former SS officer, emerged with a surprising 7.5% of the vote. The showing not only secured the Republicans their first eleven seats in the 138-member city legislature but guaranteed the party two seats in the Bundestag, to be occupied after the national elections in 1990. As for the cocky Christian Democrats, they trailed their own 1985 performance by almost 9 percentage points, winding up with just 55 seats, the same number captured by their perennial rival, the Social Democratic Party. The Free Democrats fared so poorly...
West Germany's Bundestag is normally an orderly parliament, courtly in its procedures and respectful of its leaders. But last week the Bundestag convened in an unaccustomed turmoil of accusation and recrimination over West Germany's role in building Libya's suspected chemical-weapons plant at Rabta. Members shouted angry questions at a government spokesman, to the visible discomfort of a dour and silent Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "Once again our history has caught up with us," said Norbert Gansel, arms-control spokesman for the opposition Social Democratic Party, referring to the country's Nazi heritage. "Once again the evil, blinkered...
...What an impudence!" fumed Ernst Hinsken, a member of West Germany's Bundestag. "Irreconcilable with the hospitality that should be shown by the host country!" complained West German Transport Minister Jurgen Warnke. The high-octane grousing in Bonn was directed at Italy, which last month imposed an experimental 110-kilometer-an-hour (68 m.p.h.) speed limit on its autostradas and an even more impudent limit of 90 kilometers (56 m.p.h.) on other roads. Yet even as Italian officials debated last week whether to return to the old 140-kilometer (87 m.p.h.) highway limit when the trial ends early next month...
...technical accords are the only formal agreements expected to emerge from Honecker's trip. His trip is classified as a "working visit," but Honecker will be accorded most of the trappings normally reserved for grander state visits, including lunch with President Richard von Weizsacker, meetings with leaders of the Bundestag and five hours of talks with Kohl. Bonn quickly acceded to one Honecker request: coffee and cake at the Essen home of Berthold Beitz, chairman of the Krupp steel empire, with whom he has developed a business and hunting friendship over the past seven years. That session will be followed...