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 parties ended the Socialists' absolute control. Since the members of the federal Senate (the Bundesrat) are chosen directly by state legislatures, Adenauer thereby gained four Bundesrat seats, clinching the two-thirds majority he needs to ratify the Paris accords.

In both provinces, the opposition Socialists had tried to stir up resentment against German rearmament, but got nowhere with the issue. The No. 2 party in Adenauer's coalition, the right-wing Free Democrats, likewise tried to stir up nationalist sentiments by calling Adenauer's Saar concessions a betrayal. They got nowhere either, and their chastened leader, Thomas Dehler (TIME, Dec. 6), hastened to reassure newsmen that he and the Chancellor had no differences.

As for Adenauer himself, he was off to Berlin to campaign in still another local election. For one audience he had a piece of news: he will shortly cease to be his own Foreign Minister in order to spend more time making certain "that the new German army is the servant, not the ruler, of the people and the government."