Word: schmidts
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...Schmidt wins a battle, but not the war, against his party's left
...strangely antiseptic for an occasion so potentially fraught with drama. For its first national congress in more than two years, West Germany's ruling Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.) had gathered in a cavernous 15,000-seat sports arena built for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. As Chancellor Helmut Schmidt addressed the 440 party delegates and the 1,000 observers present at the event, he faced a sea of unoccupied seats, and his voice echoed through the near empty hall, so distorted by bad acoustics that many in his audience barely understood...
...supporters had predicted, Schmidt carried the day. Delegates declared their preference by raising red voting cards, but no count was considered necessary because Schmidt had clearly received a majority of roughly 2 to 1. Yet it was an oddly hollow victory in a congress that failed to lift the party out of its deep-seated doldrums. Although Schmidt's coalition of Social Democrats and the Free Democratic Party was reelected with a handsome majority of 45 seats only 19 months ago, it has been in steady decline since then...
...only is the Social Democratic Party rived internally over Schmidt's nuclear-defense policy, but it has increasingly been unable to agree with its junior partners, the business-oriented Free Democrats, on how to finance an economic policy that would reduce West Germany's 8% unemployment rate, the highest in 30 years.To strengthen his position, Schmidt last week was preparing to reshuffle several key portfolios in his Cabinet.At the same time, Bonn's relations with Washington have been strained as the result of what the Reagan Administration sees as an insufficiently firm attitude toward Moscow...
...only good news for Schmidt as he packed his bags for Munich was that, in spite of his party's troubles, he remains his country's most popular politician. To give his government a new image, Schmidt was making plans to reshuffle key portfolios in his Cabinet. But given the mood in Munich, it was unlikely that any move could detract attention for long from the Social Democrats' deep divisions...