Word: schmidts
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Last Sunday's German elections, in which Chancellor Helmut Schmidt won a narrow victory over his conservative challenger Helmut Kohl represents a return to the "more traditional German mainstream politics," Guido Goldman '59, senior lecturer in Government, said yesterday...
...Schmidt's trouble in the election of 1972 was a very unusual one that took place in the middle of a legislative period, and many thought it was a kind of illegitimate event. Schmidt's coalition this year is enough of a majority to launch a strong and successful coalition," Goldman said...
...Schmidt, 57, is unquestionably the more popular of the two. In one recent poll, 53% of the voters favored him as Chancellor, compared with 38% for Kohl. But the Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.) is not nearly so well liked. This could mean trouble for Schmidt; under the country's parliamentary system, West Germans vote for parties and individual representatives to the Bundestag, rather than directly for a Chancellor...
Much of the electorate seems to believe it is time for a change. The Social Democrats, in coalition with the small, liberal Free Democratic Party, have been in power for seven years. Schmidt, however, has been Chancellor only since May 1974; he took office when Brandt resigned after one of his closest aides was unmasked as an East German...
Another problem for the S.P.D. is its reputation, mostly undeserved, for being soft on Communism. Though Schmidt is an outspoken antiCommunist, many Germans are dismayed by what they now feel was the excessive willingness of Brandt to normalize relations with the regimes of Eastern Europe without sufficient quid...