GERMANY: Voters' Verdict

Every time a provincial election is held in Germany, some excitable correspondents cable that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer faces a precarious vote of confidence. The fact is, Der Alte has the largest parliamentary majority of any political leader in any major West European country. Local setbacks to his party at best only suggest a trend (as do similar elections in the U.S.), but they cannot bring him down. Last week 9,000,000 West Germans went to the polls in Hesse and Bavaria. Adenauer's Christian Democrats lost some strength in Bavaria but kept control of the local legislature; in Hesse, they and other...