West Germany: Ready for a Fight

West Germany is also facing elections, though they are still quite a way off. Nonetheless, political maneuvering has already begun between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, now joined in an uneasy coalition that will be dissolved just before the voters go to the polls some time in autumn 1969. Last week Willy Brandt, the Socialist leader who is also Foreign Minister in the Grand Coalition, took the occasion of a Socialist Party convention in Nürnberg to fire an opening salvo designed to shred some of the areas of agreement that have held the coalition partners together.

Defying the longtime...