When the carnival season comes to an end in Germany on Ash Wednesday, the country's political parties take the opportunity for one last great hurrah before the 40-day period of Lent. The heated rhetoric of their much publicized speeches in Passau, Vilshofen and Sonthofen on Political Ash Wednesday is a long-standing and much publicized tradition in Bavaria.

Franz Josef Strauss, the provocateur

The verbal sparring matches first become popular in the mid 1970s. Franz Josef Strauss, the then head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), is seen today as the father of the tradition. Amidst the cheers and jeers of his supporters, he took on his Social Democratic foes every year until his death in 1988, sometimes even deliberately insulting them.

Strauss once called Egon Bahr, the creator of the "Ostpolitik" under Chancellor Willy Brandt, which launched the normalization of relations between West and East Germany, and the rest of Eastern Europe, a "dilettante amateur diplomat." He classified former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as a security risk of the highest order, and ended his speeches with the famous bon mot: "Sozis hoassen's, Kommunisten san's!" (They call themselves Social Democrats, but they are communists!).

Speeches often hit below the belt, sometimes quite literally. In the wake of the 1968 student unrest, a CSU member of parliament said the Social Democratic Party (SPD) only came to power in 1969 "because we didn't castrate the red oxen in time."

Speeches also sometimes got a bit playful. "It's not true, that I eat a Social Democrat for breakfast every day," Strauss once said to a crowd of 7,000 cheering supporters. "I only eat what I like."

Not only in Bavaria

Political Ash Wednesday can be traced back to the first great People's Assembly organized by the Bavarian Farmers Association on March 5, 1919. On that day, pubs and taverns were filled with heated political debate. Those who took on their opponents with the sharpest criticism received the most applause from the generally inebriated audience members.

For a long time, the yearly tradition was the domain of the CSU, but in the mid 1960s the Social Democrats began their own meeting. Since then, both the Green and the Left parties have also followed suit - today, all of Germany's political parties hold such political events at the end of the carnival season, always accompanied by a large contingent of journalists.

The hot topics of the past - Konrad Adenauer's Westpolitik and Brandt's Ostpolitik, the arms race in the 1980s - polarized the political establishment, the CDU/CSU and the SPD were at odds. But today, the political agendas of the two parties are closer together than ever.

Long-time observers say the political rhetoric of recent years has been nowhere near as heated as in the early years. But the media still gives the annual shindig its utmost attention, even when, as one observer once remarked, it's now more about the "beer input and the sweat output."

Author: Volker Wagener / cmk
Editor: Andreas Illmer