Willy Brandt: the Life of a Statesman, Part 12 of 12
"Our state, vigilant and ready to fight enemies of democracy, needs authority, which rests on the support of its citizens, made known via elections, and which is legitimised by moral capacity."
If a democracy is unable to produce the kind of coalitions that are necessary for the survival of society, then we can say that democracy is unsustainable. At that point, we only have two choices, to indulge in authoritarianism or to invent a stronger version of democracy.
The weaknesses of the Social Democrats, even when they were at their peak, suggests that we should look for a system that allows for the construction of stronger coalitions.
Every time I say this on Twitter, people fight back and claim that I’m suggesting an attack on democracy. They prefer to try again, during this next election, and maybe this next time everything will be different, maybe the people will finally listen to the Social Democrats, to the progressives, maybe this next time everything will work out the right way, maybe the right people will win, and then they can pass all of the laws that need to be passed.
I’d suggest that if this strategy has not worked over the previous century, then it probably won’t work over the next century.
Almost everywhere, progressives seem to think their choice is to either participate in the kind of democracy that conservatives favor, or resort to anti-democratic approaches to politics, or drop out of democratic electoral politics and set up a small commune, and focus on their private lives, essentially becoming apolitical.
I’d suggest we can focus on the structures of elections themselves, and this might offer better results.
Willy Brandt
Life of a Statesman
By Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 2016
--------
Page 166-168
A New Equilibrium
Italy aside, the European Community was still very much centred in the north in the mid-1970s. Many of the southern European countries were still trying to rid themselves of authoritarian regimes, which had long delayed their political and economic development. In April 1974 Marcelo Caetano, the Portuguese prime minister and the dictator António Salazar’s successor, was overthrown by the military, which then formed a government together with the socialists and communists. How could the Germans help the Portuguese socialists establish themselves firmly, when the Lusitanian communists were threatening to exclude them? With the financial and logistical support of the SPD, the Portuguese Socialst Party (Partido Socialista) was founded in the middle of April 1973 at Bad Münstereifel. Its leader was Mária Soares, who had been in exile in France until then. Starting in the autumn of 1974, Brandt tried to use his prestige and his contacts to help Soares and to prevent Portugal falling under a new dictatorship, this time an extreme left-wing one. He made a point of attending the first Partido Socialista congress in Lisbon at the end of 1974 and put his lifelong experience of opposition to communism at the service of his socialist friends. He was motivated to help the Portuguese not just out of solidarity between social democrats, but also because of his more general commitment to pluralist democracy. He spoke to Brezhnev about the problem during a visit to Moscow on 3 July 1975 and asked the Soviets to control their subordinates in the Iberian Peninsula.
In Washington, Kissinger thought the whole of southern Europe was on its way to becoming Marxist. For Brandt, it was clear that either an American intervention or the resurgence of the Portuguese right were likely consequences of the extreme left seizing power in Lisbon. At a meeting of socialist heads of government and leaders of social democratic parties in Stockholm, Brandt proposed the creation of the Friendship and Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Socialism in Portugal, and took charge of it in September 1975. It was crucial that it was Europeans who strengthened democracy in Portugal. The strategy paid off at the Portuguese elections in 1976 – thanks to public support, but also to a massive, secret programme to finance the Partido Socialista through the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation. These German funds, paid into bank accounts or given as cash to emissaries visiting the Chancellery discreetly, were shared out between Portugal and Spain.
Spain was in a similar situation to Portugal, and it was a situation which posed a threat to the equilibrium in Europe, demanding the mobilisation of democrats and justifying the dissemination of the Spanish left’s demands. When he visited the Partido Socialista congress in Lisbon in the autumn of 1974, Brandt had met Felipe González, the young secretary general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), with whom he immediately formed a good relationship. For Brandt, supporting the establishment of the PSOE in the new Spanish political landscape was an important part of his struggle against the trauma caused by Franco’s victory at the end of March 1939. He felt he had to help make up for the European democrats’ weaknesses against Francoism, but it was also a personal matter for him. ‘If one of the duties of a politician is to hide his emotions, you can see that at this precise moment, I am no politician,’ he admitted, before continuing his speech, in Spanish, at the first PSOE party congress to take place in Spain, on 5 December 1976. His memories of Barcelona came flooding back – the Hotel Falcon, the disappearance of his friend Mark Rein, his feeling of impotence.
His intuitions about the Communists’ methods, formed during his brief time in Spain, had been confirmed by the actions of the later Soviet Bloc. He had needed great perseverance to save Ostpolitik and maintain détente, and then to reach a compromise with Moscow and the Eastern European countries over the course of two years of negotiations, between 1973 and 1975. On 1 August 1975, Brandt was overjoyed to hear that the Helsinki Accords, the first act of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), had been signed. It was the continuation of his Ostpolitik. Both sides were happy.
--------
Page 171-172
In Europe itself, relationships between the various socialist parties were not always smooth. Brandt tried to calm down the heated relationship between Chancellor Schmidt and the French Parti Socialiste, led by François Mitterrand. Schmidt was annoyed with the French because on 19 January 1976, at a meeting of the Socialist International in Helsingør, in Denmark, Mitterrand had argued strongly in favour of making alliances between socialist and communist parties, in the image of his strategic union of the left in France. Schmidt had protested vehemently, accusing the Frenchman of being naive and not understanding the situation in Germany. Brandt believed it was important to have Mitterrand in the Socialist International. He was less horrified than Schmidt by Mitterrand’s suggestion, but nevertheless he states publicly that such an alliance was out of the question for the SPD, which still needed to differentiate itself from the Eastern Communists. A few weeks later, Mitterrand and Brandt had dinner together, and the French First Secretary explained his strategy for gaining power in France, which had 5 million communist voters. Brandt was persuaded. The two men understood each other well. On several occasions he told Mitterrand, as he did Palme and Kreisky, how much their friendship mattered to him. But it took him 18 months to convince Schmidt to meet with Mitterrand. Many people in the SPD feared that their party’s relations with the PS, who were on the verge of gaining power in Germany’s most important neighbour, had been incurably soured. Schmidt was biased against the French left, who were strong critics of his methods in the fight against terrorism; he had particularly not appreciated Sartre visiting Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison in December 1974, when the philosopher had denounced the ‘inhuman conditions’ in the prison, while taking everything the most notorious terrorist in Europe said at face value.
The exceptional police powers put in place to fight against the Red Army Faction and its supporters were causing murmurs of discontent even within the SPD. In February 1978, the new anti-terrorism laws were almost voted down in the Bundestag. Brandt had to call his party’s parliamentary group to order. As leader of the SPD, he was still responsible for holding together a party which seemed to disagree about everything except the fact that he was its leader. He undoubtedly had a unique moral and political authority, even among the opposition. Although he preferred mediation to exercising this authority, sometimes he was forced to speak bluntly. Differences of opinion within the party were unavoidable. A journalist who interviewed him on 7 April 1976 for the radio station Südwestfunk provoked him, and he replied, ‘The SPD is not a Prussian military formation. In a party with more than a million members, there will always be groups of various sorts, and different movements.’ He wanted to ensure that the SPD, which still held power as part of the social-liberal coalition under Schmidt, kept its political inventiveness, at the same time as being realistic and responsible. ‘Our state, vigilant and ready to fight enemies of democracy, needs authority. The sort of authority that rests on the values and the support of its citizens, which is founded on elections, which is accountable and which is legitimised by moral capacity and intellectual honesty,’ he said in 1975 at the celebrations to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Ferdinand Lassalle, the SPD’s founding father.