Word: erhards
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With elections coming up this month in two important West German states, Mende was determined to dissociate himself from Erhard and stake out a popular vote-catching position for his party. In a marathon Cabinet session, Mende argued for holding the tax line. Having made his point, he finally settled for a compromise whereby Erhard pledged to resort to increased taxes only if economizing measures proved insufficient. Next morning the humiliation of the headlines-FREE DEMOCRATS CAVE IN -forced the Free Democrats to reconsider their position. Within a few hours, Mende telephoned Erhard that the F.D.P. had quit the coalition...
...Alignments? Erhard accepted the decision with grim calm. Refusing to quit or call new national elections, he doubled up the assignments of some of his ministers to cover the vacated portfolios and vowed to carry on business as usual. His strongest support was West Germany's constitution, which states that a Chancellor can be removed from office only when a majority of the Bundestag can agree in advance on his successor...
...rumors of startling new alignments in West German politics. As unlikely as it seemed, whispers rose that the Free Democrats might join with the Social Democratic Party in a coalition government and thus break 17 years of uninterrupted Christian Democrat rule. Mende, eager to establish a bargaining position with Erhard, declared that "in principle" he saw no objection to a coalition with the Socialists. There was also talk of a "grand coalition" between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, with Interior Minister Paul Lücke as Chancellor. It was a course especially attractive to both the Christian Demo cratic...
Distant Enemies. The crisis laid bare the ugly infighting in the C.D.U. Of the leading Christian Democratic politicians, only Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder really rallied to Erhard's side. Most of the others seemed poised, in the words of Erich Mende, like "Brutuses waiting to strike down the Chancellor's Julius Caesar." Some seemed happy to make the coalition rebuilding job as difficult as possible...
...such a job was not out of the question. At week's end Erhard turned up to toast Mende at his 50th birthday celebration. Would the Free Democrats some day rejoin his government? a reporter asked Erhard. "Why not?" shot back the Chancellor, but Mende chimed in that he had a condition: Erhard must first clean out the troublemakers within his own party...