Brandt 1972: Upsurge for Willy – politics

50 years ago, on April 27, 1972, the German Bundestag passed the first constructive vote of no confidence in the history of the Federal Republic. With the motion, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group wanted to have its chairman Rainer Barzel elected as Willy Brandt’s successor to the office of Federal Chancellor. The social-liberal coalition had gradually lost its already narrow majority of twelve votes since the September 1969 election due to factional changes.

In the spring of 1972, the lead was only four votes. And rumors circulated that other MPs – three from the FDP and one from the SPD – were determined to convert. Nevertheless, the chancellor ‘to be’ hesitated. According to surveys, satisfaction with government policy was generally limited, but Ostpolitik enjoyed great approval, and Brandt himself also achieved high sympathy ratings.

When the CDU finally won the absolute majority in the state elections in Baden-Württemberg on April 23, Franz Josef Strauss in particular urged the hesitant Barzel to act. The outcome is known: Barzel was missing two votes. the Southgerman newspaper wrote of the “Miracle of Bonn”. But as is sometimes the case with “miracles”, obviously not everything went right with this one either.

Fundamental democratization or attack on the Basic Law?

The book by the historian and long-standing deputy director of the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation, Bernd Rother, deals only marginally with these “covert operations” and cash flows. He is more concerned with the previously little noticed protests, in which more than 400,000 people took part nationwide.

Who initiated and organized these protests? Were there any focal points in certain regions or sectors? Which forms of action and slogans dominated? And, more generally, what was the significance of the mass protests for the political culture of the Federal Republic? Were they part of the “fundamental democratization” of society? Or was it, on the contrary, an attack on parliamentary representative democracy and the constitution? After all, the protesters and strikers rejected the “constitutional procedure” of a vote of no confidence under Article 67 of the Basic Law as “illegitimate”.

In order to be able to reconstruct the protest events, Rother evaluated more than 30 regional and national newspapers, as well as publications by radical left-wing groups and parties from the German Communist Party (DKP) to Trotskyist and Maoist organizations, which are contained in the Internet database “Materials for the Analysis of Opposition”. are recorded. He also found some documents in radio archives and in the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation.

In a first step, Rother briefly discusses political strikes before 1972, which – in contrast to some Western and Southern European countries – in Germany “were not among the traditional forms of action of the workers’ movement”. In September 1969, to the surprise of many observers, the Federal Republic experienced an “unprecedented wave” of spontaneous, uncontrolled strikes with at least 140,000 participants.

Although these protests were predominantly economically motivated, they had a significant impact on the political debate. Did a “reactivation and repoliticization” of the working class become envisaged, and thus a renaissance of the working class as a “subject of social change”? However, most social science analyzes came to the conclusion that no “politicization of the workers” had taken place; even a DKP-affiliated research institute summed up that “everywhere a clear allergy to political demands” was unmistakable.

Protests “from below and outside the party”

The surprise in the SPD party executive and in the executives of the trade unions was all the greater when demonstrations, rallies and strikes began on Tuesday, April 25th, and lasted until the afternoon of April 27th, the date of the vote on the motion of no confidence . Rother found no evidence that the demonstrations and strikes pro Brandt “were initiated or even controlled by the SPD.” Rather, the pressure came “from below and from outside the party.”

The ‘fires’ in the Ruhr area blazed particularly hard: as early as Tuesday, she knew Southgerman newspaper to report that the “works councils of the 28,000 Hoesch workers in Dortmund telegraphed to the parliamentary group leaders in Bonn that the mood was ‘up to storm'”. But strikes and protests also took place in the Bergisches Land and in East Westphalia. After North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, with Kassel and the greater Frankfurt area, formed the second strike focus, followed by Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The most common and, in terms of the number of participants, the most important form of protest were works meetings with a total of almost 300,000 employees. Around 130,000 people took part in demonstrations and rallies.

Rother is well aware that the protesters in April 1972 formed a minority compared, for example, to the seven million members of the German trade union federation or the approximately 22 million dependent employees. However, he rejects such comparative calculations as “apolitical”, after all, no protest movement has seen a majority of the population take to the streets. He therefore insists that the mobilization against the no-confidence vote was “the largest protest movement” since the “Fight Nuclear Death” campaign of 1958. It was only surpassed by the protests against retrofitting in October 1983 with around 1.3 million people.

North Rhine-Westphalia was the hotspot

After the highly graphic account of the events leading up to April 27, the author turns to the analysis of the events. He notes, for example, that North Rhine-Westphalia was the main focus with around 60 percent of the protests; in terms of sectors, it was the metal industry, while mining, chemical and textile industries were surprisingly “almost completely absent”. Rother is able to bring to light few insights into the genesis and dynamics of the protests. Although there was an “undisputed leading figure” in the form of Brandt, there does not seem to have been a leader in the narrower sense of the word ‘on site’. One conclusion is that the strikes and protests “were not brought into the factories from outside”. The “displeasure over the motion of no confidence arose literally overnight”.

By the morning of April 25 at the latest, “virtually everyone” would have known of the intentions of the CDU/CSU. And this “intent to overthrow the Federal Chancellor provoked widespread rejection”. Even the head of the Hohenzollern family, Louis Ferdinand, sent a telegram congratulating Brandt “with all his heart” on his “personal triumph”. And parliamentary democracy, according to a second conclusion, emerged “stronger from the crisis”. As “short-term and eruptive” as the protest had begun, everyday life returned just as quickly, especially since most contemporaries did not (yet) know anything about the mutual attempts at bribery.

Rother has presented a wonderful and enormously informative study on a topic that has not played a significant role in public perception until now. Research and the feuilleton are in the process of rediscovering the year 1972. The protests of this year can certainly be understood as an important element of this reassessment.

Werner Bührer is a contemporary historian. He lives in Munich.