A coalition of the FDP, the Greens and the SPD is currently on the way. She wants to resolve a bottleneck in two areas: Global warming must be fought more vigorously and digitalization must be pushed forward. The high tone that is struck here is reminiscent of the government declaration that Willy Brandt made in 1969 for the newly formed coalition of SPD and FDP: The Germans should be a “people of good neighbors”, he himself wanted to be a “Chancellor of internal reforms” and “dare more democracy”.
Three subject areas were named here. The first was Ostpolitik. In the disputes over the treaties of Moscow and Warsaw in 1970 and the basic treaty with the GDR in 1972, Brandt emphasized that, like Konrad Adenauer before him, he wanted the reunification of Germany, but not through confrontation, but through recognition of the borders drawn since 1945. The FDP agreed with him. As an industry-oriented party, it listened to the interests of companies in opening up markets in the socialist countries. In 1963 Egon Bahr had found a formula for the new strategy: “Change through rapprochement”. This course was successful: when the economically weak socialist countries came into contact with the capitalist world market, they became dependent on it. The hegemony of the Soviet Union over its sphere of influence was no longer as certain as it was before.
Another SPD Chancellor made a contribution to the fact that what was already fluctuating was also pushed: In 1977 Helmut Schmidt gave a speech in London in which it was suggested what NATO decided in 1979: the deployment of medium-range missiles of the “Pershing II ”and cruise missiles. The Soviet Union was no longer able to cope with this new arms race. In 1990, cabbage harvested what Brandt and Schmidt had sown. In this respect, the social-liberal coalition actually contributed to reunification.
With his announcement that he wanted to be a chancellor of internal reforms, Brandt referred to deficits in the West German infrastructure. After the border between the two German states was closed in 1961, the underfunded education and higher education system in the FRG was overwhelmed by replacing the influx of high school graduates, skilled workers and doctors that had previously come from the GDR: by expanding and reforming schools and universities. For the SPD, education was a hope for advancement for the previously disadvantaged, for the FDP it was also the infrastructure for a functioning market economy. The leading theorist of the Free Democrats, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, went further. For him, liberalism meant not only a market economy, but also the guarantee of equal opportunities for everyone through the public sector: social liberalism. The fact that, in today’s retrospect, the years of the Brandt era are particularly seen as a phase of stormy reforms goes back to the expansion and democratization of educational institutions. However, within the division of competencies in federalism, this was primarily a matter for the federal states. After all, the federal government is now also more involved in science and research policy.
The FDP presented a document of its social-liberal renewal in 1971 with its “Freiburg Theses” (Friday 30/2021), among other things, she advocated a municipal land reserve policy. Here, too, there were agreements with the SPD. The Urban Development Promotion Act from the same year made public funds available for the renovation of old buildings. Alongside the SPD and FDP, the unions were a driving force behind internal reforms. Its influence during a period of lively strike activity from 1969 to 1974 was also reflected in the legislation: elimination of the inequality between workers and employees in terms of continued wages in the event of illness (1970), lowering of the retirement age from 65 to 63 after 35 creditable insurance years, expansion of trade union rights in The amended Works Constitution Act of 1972, extension of co-determination in the supervisory boards of stock corporations beyond the coal and steel sector, decided in 1976, came into force in 1977.
The CDU and CSU initially treated the change of government in 1969 as a kind of anomaly that should be corrected as soon as possible. Only after the failure of a no-confidence vote against Brandt and their clear defeat in the early elections in 1972 did they adjust to a more long-term opposition policy. In the past, the CDU was mainly managed from the Chancellery at the federal level. With the new chairman, Helmut Kohl (since 1973) – based on the model of the Bavarian sister party CSU – it presented itself for the first time with a powerful apparatus (Friday 40/2021). Their General Secretary Kurt Biedenkopf played a major role in this. He was also active in ideological politics: terms had to be occupied and the hegemony of the social-liberal zeitgeist broken in the long term. From 1975 his successor Heiner Geißler raised the “New Social Question”. It concerns the problems of people whom the welfare state in its current form is unable to help.
The extent to which an opposition can influence government action had already been shown by the constant agitation of the Union against an alleged threat to the state through communist infiltration. Brandt acted: Together with the prime ministers of the federal states, he passed on January 28, 1972 “Principles on the question of anti-constitutional forces in the public service”. They were intended to prevent young people who had been politicized in the student movement of the 1960s and who had organized themselves in left-wing organizations, including the German Communist Party, from exercising their chosen professions, such as teachers. The slogan that more democracy should be dared thus showed a double bottom. Despite new Ostpolitik and reforms, the Federal Republic of Germany had to remain an anti-communist front-line state in the ongoing system conflict.
The dynamic phase of movement in the social-liberal coalition ended soon after its election victory in September 1972. In the spring of 1973, the Bundesbank and the federal government adopted a “tight money policy” to combat inflation: Rising interest rates and restricting spending were intended to limit rising labor incomes and an expansion of the national budget. After Brandt’s resignation in 1974, there were still internal reforms under his successor Helmut Schmidt. But now they had to stay cost-neutral. They were profoundly where they strengthened individual rights of freedom. Here again there were intersections between the FDP and the SPD. In 1973 the criminality of homosexuality was lifted. And in 1976 the social indication for a punishable termination of pregnancy was made possible. A reform of matrimonial and family law that was adopted in the same year and came into force in 1977 replaced the principle of fault with the principle of breakdown in the case of divorces.
In terms of economic policy, Schmidt came under increasing pressure from an FDP towards the end of the 1970s, which, at the same time as Thatcher and Reagan, turned the corner towards neoliberalism. To the extent that the Chancellor had to give in to her, the trade unions and parts of his party moved away from him. In 1982 the FDP Economics Minister Otto Graf Lambsdorff provoked a break with social liberalism and the SPD with a radical position paper. The coalition broke up. Future historians will report whether the development of the traffic light government can one day be described in a similar way.
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