NEO-NAZIS GAIN IN GERMAN ELECTIONS
By J. C. Vergeylen
[Since October 27, when the Free Democratic party left Chancellor Ludwig Erhard's coalition cabinet, the German government has been in a state of crisis. The elections in Hesse on November 6 and in Bavaria on November 20, it was hoped by the bourgeoisie, would indicate a way out.
(Unexpectedly, however, the Free Democratic party was reduced still further and the Social Democrats failed to come through with a smashing victory. Instead, the neo- Nazi National Democratic party made gains. These came on top of the showing made by the ultrareactionary political formation in the local elections last March in Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, when it chalked up around 10% of the vote.
{In Bavaria on November 20, the neo-Nazis made their strongest showing to date in that state, scoring 7.4% of the vote and winning 15 out of 204 seats in the state legislature. The Christian Social Union, the Bavarian branch of the Christian Democratic Union, won 48.2% of the statewide vote, and the Social Democrats scored 45. 8%. This was slightly better for both parties than in the elections of 1962. The Free Democrats dropped only slightly.
[The article translated below appeared. in the Belgian socialist weekly La_ Gauche of November 19. The analysis it provides of the returns in Hease anticipates the results two weeks later in Bavaria.]
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The results in the Hesse legislative elections constitute a disquieting sign. A victory for the Social Democrats [SPD] at the expense of the Christian Democratic Union [CDU] was expected, along with a slight advance for the liberals [FDP -- Free Democratic -_party], who hoped to: gain from their demagogic attitude toward a proposed tax increase. tthe FDP resigned: from the coalition when Erhard proposed a plan to increase taxes to meet a deficit of $1,000,000,000 in the government budget. ]
Upsetting all the forecasts, the Social Democrats increased their vote but little (0.2%), while the losses of the CDU (2.4%) and the Refugees Association (2.2%) helped swell the vote for the slate of the New Democratic party [NDP], the neo-Nazi party which thus won 9 seats in one of the parliaments of the Federal Republic as against 52 for the Social Democrats, 26 for the Christian Democrats and 10 for the ‘liberals.
' Me NDP, which is shot through with the Nazi ideology, displayed virulent antiparliamentarism during the election campaign. As the NDP put it, a parliamentary regime ends in nothing but incoherence and division. From this it is only a step to calling for a strong man capable of solving all problems.
Three officials of the Bavarian section of the NDP, including its chairman, Franz Florian Winter, resigned, holding that the NDP is honeycombed today with former Nazis, and that as a party it no longer offers what they had hoped from it.
About a year ago, La Gauche devoted an entire page to the NDP and the racist and fascist smell of its press.
If it is true that the voters in Hesse wanted to vote for new faces, it is also true that what turned them in this direction was the circus performance that has recently been put on at Bonn.
Last March in the municipal elections in Franconia, the NDP reaped its first successes. A.little later it doubled its vote in the state of Hamburg. Now it has picked up -9 seats in'the Hesse legislature. In the November 20 elections, another warning signal will certainly be: seen. nO ; an Dt .
While the ultraright is able to participate in the elections, move freely about and spread its racist poison, the KPD [German Communist party] is banned and can carry on only in the underground. The chairman of the KPD, Max Reimann, asked the party's sympathizers to cast their-votes for the SPD in the November 6 elections in Hesse and the November 20 elections in- Bavaria.
The federal authorities, so tolerant with regard to the activities of the NDP, are less tolerant when a militant of the left is concerned. A shocking example: the antifascist fighter Emil Bechtle, who is seriously ill, is still held in.the -prison hospital at Hohenasperg. He was..condemned to eight months in prison in 1955 by the federal court at Karlsruhe for his militant participation four years earlier in the "Committee against the Remilitarization of Germany." He was not even allowed to see his wife, of Jewish origin, who-was persecuted under the Nazis and who died while he was in prison. Méanwhite, the federal .courts placed new charges against him for demonstrating against: nucléar - arms for the’ Bundeswehr and against ‘the proposed "state of siege" laws.
The Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and liberals shrug off any responsibility for the progress of the NDP. Up: to now none of then have. suggested any | measures whatever to bar a new version of. Hitlerisn. : . : Boo! : Minister of the: Interior Lucke has offered a quite: ‘simple explanation for the victory, of these "ghosts": . . . :
"Certain demands of ‘the Allied powers arouse bad memories of the Versailles
Treaty. Our Western friends must take into account the fact that we need a respite. We must give the youth a chance to believe in their own country and to convince themselves that we are not a mere appendage of Great Britain or France."
As to how to choke off the rising Nazism, Lucke replied: "Remind the Allies that it is their duty to wipe out the lawless Communist regime of East Berlin."
I prefer to leave it to the newspaper Le Monde (November 10) to draw the conclusion: "That's something to think about. The Communists, as is well known, are the electoral agents of Nazism. What if they should get the fantastic idea of setting fire to the Bundestag?"