W. German workers face a choice of evils

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Schmidt with close ally Carter labovel and an anti-Strauss demonstration (right)

2,000 students and teachers demonstrated through Paris last Monday closures, increases in class sizes and the gearing of education to industry There would seem to be more than a few parallels between the US Presidential election and the election to be held next Sunday in West Germany to decide the Chancellorship.

Franz Joseph Strauss, the right wing Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social: Union candidate, standing against the Social Democratic Party incumbent Schmidt looks very much like Reagan against Carter.

Hostility

It points to the same poverty of choice for the bourgeoisie of the respective countries that such an apparent electoral liability as Strauss was chosen to oppose Schmidt.

Vicious hostility to Strauss has shown itself all over West Germany where anti-Strauss committees have been set up in most large cities focussing on the rallies he speaks at.

In at least two of them-the big northern industrial centres of Hamburg and Bremen-tens of thousands of people have attempted to break the rallies up and riot police were called in to disperse the demonstrators.

Cashed in Schmidt has of course easily cashed in on the anti-Strauss feeling and has used both that and the relative stability of the German economy in the midst of the capitalist recession as his election platform.

Although because of Schmidt's continued detente policy with the USSR Strauss has attempted anti-communist witch-hunting, the policies of the SPD and the CDU/CSU are almost identical and the SPD only retains a majority in the Bundestag (parliament)" by a formal coalition with the capitalist Free Democratic Party (FPD).

Because of the apathy of the German electorate caused by the bipartisan politics of West Germany Schmidt has warned against complacency among SPD supporters and has carefully avoided spelling out the long predicted public spending cuts he will have to after October 5.

Prepare fight

The task confronting the German working class is clear. No votes must go to the Free Democratic Party. An SPD government with an overall majority must be returned and workers must then prepare to take up a fight against the inevitable attacks on their living , standards that will be launched by the Schmidt government in the face of the growing recession as an essential step in the fight to build a new revolutionary leadership in the German labour movement.

SNESS