The Christian Democratic parties

The CDU is a centre-right party that endorses conservative social values and the social market economy. In government for much of Germany’s post-World War II history, it headed governments from 1949 to 1966 and from 1982 to 1998 (in alliance with the FDP and CSU); it returned to power in 2005 in a coalition with the CSU and the SPD. Beginning in 2009, the CDU headed a new coalition with the CSU and the FDP. The CDU is a successor of the old Catholic Centre Party and kindred bourgeois parties, either Protestant or nonsectarian. In a country in which one’s religion often determined one’s politics, the party’s strongest constituencies are still in the Roman Catholic districts, although the sectarian Christian aspect is of only incidental emphasis, chiefly among older voters. The party strongly endorses Germany’s leading role in the EU, its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a free market economy, and vigorous material assistance to the countries of the former communist bloc, especially the onetime Soviet republics. It is established in all states except Bavaria, where the more conservative CSU functions as its counterpart in effectively a permanent coalition.

A branch of the CDU (known as CDU-Ost) existed in East Germany throughout that country’s history. However, it was only tolerated to preserve the facade of a multiparty system. With the overthrow of the ruling communist regime in East Germany’s first free elections, on March 18, 1990, it was this rump party that took power by a large mandate, with Lothar de Maizière as minister president presiding over the six-month transitional period to unification.

The Social Democrats

The SPD, in government from 1966 to 1982 (1966–69 with the CDU and 1969–82 with the FDP) and from 1998 to 2009 (1998–2005 with the Greens and 2005–09 with the CDU-CSU), is the heir to the Marxist parties of the 19th century. In East Germany, which historically was the stronghold of the socialist movement in Germany, the SPD was subsumed by the formation of the SED in 1946. Ostensibly a combination of the old Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; KPD) and the Socialist Party, the SED was in fact simply the ruling communist party. In West Germany the SPD’s early postwar leadership, drawing strength from its record of opposition to Nazism, adhered to a rigorously orthodox Marxism, opposed vehemently the communist movement from which it had split in the early 20th century, and rejected West Germany’s rearmament and the country’s integration into the Western military defense system. In 1959, however, the SPD, in the so-called “Bad Godesberg Resolution,” discarded its doctrinaire approach; nationalization of industry was dropped in favour of gradualist reform, and appeals to class warfare were abandoned. The party broadened its base to attract increasingly greater segments of the middle class. The SPD was cautious about unification, fearing that it would unleash enormous financial and emotional costs. Unlike the CDU, the SPD did not initially gain a windfall of votes in eastern Germany.

The Free Democrats

Because neither the CDU-CSU nor the SPD have generally been able to win enough votes to capture a majority of seats in the Bundestag, the balance of power has often rested with the FDP. The successor of the older German liberal parties, the FDP has generally adopted free trade, pro-business, and anticlerical positions. The party now serves as a liberal, bourgeois alternative to the CDU and SPD and often exercises a power far beyond the 6 to 10 percent support it regularly receives in national elections. For example, FDP leader Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Germany’s foreign minister from 1974 to 1992, was often viewed as the architect of German unification. In 2009 it won its best-ever electoral results—14.6 percent of the national vote—and formed a governing coalition with the ruling CDU-CSU.

The Greens

The ecologist Green Party was formed in West Germany in 1980 and merged with the eastern German Alliance ’90 in 1993. It has been the only completely new party to win national representation in the post-World War II era. Formed by mainly younger groups of environmentalists, opponents of nuclear power, and pacifists, the Greens successfully broke the 5 percent barrier in the 1983 election. On the heels of the accident at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, the Greens captured in excess of 8 percent of the overall vote and sent 22 delegates to the Bundestag. However, internal disputes between the “realists” (Realos), who took a pragmatic approach to environmental policies, and the “fundamentalists” (Fundis), who eschewed compromise in favour of ideological purity, and dissension over individual issues weakened the cohesion of the party’s constituent factions. In 1990 the Green Party failed to surpass the 5 percent threshold. Its union with Alliance ’90 enabled it to reenter the Bundestag beginning in 1994, and from 1998 to 2005 it served as a junior partner in an SPD-led coalition. The party increased its representation in the Bundestag to 68 seats in the 2009 election. A catastrophic accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011 sparked a massive surge in support for Greens at the state level. In March 2011 an impressive showing in Baden-Württemberg, traditionally a CDU stronghold, won the Greens their first state government at the head of a coalition with the SPD.

The Left Party

The Left Party formed as an alliance between the PDS and the disillusioned members of the SPD and of the Green Party who had established the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit) in western Germany. The PDS was the successor party to East Germany’s former ruling party, the SED, which controlled the entire government apparatus until the system’s demise in 1989–90. After unification the SED lost most of its supporters and members. The PDS won 11 percent of the vote in eastern Germany in the first all-German election in 1990, giving it 17 seats in the Bundestag. During the 1990s the party gained strength in eastern Germany, where unemployment remained stubbornly high and economic conditions lagged. Although it did not surpass the 5 percent threshold in 1994, the PDS won enough constituency seats to gain Bundestag representation, and in 1998 it captured 5.1 percent of the vote, including some 20 percent in the former East German territories. The PDS largely remained a regional party, but it scored successes in eastern German states and even formed a coalition government with the SPD in Berlin in 2002. In 2002 it again failed to cross the 5 percent threshold, but in 2005 the PDS and its left allies in western Germany—together known as the Left Party—captured nearly 9 percent of the national vote and won more than 50 seats in the Bundestag. Support for the Left Party continued to grow, and in 2009 it won nearly 12 percent of the national vote and increased its number of seats in the Bundestag to 76.

Fringe parties

In the late 20th century the rightist Republican Party and the DVU were the most visible of Germany’s fringe parties. With their tiny memberships, neither of these parties has been able to surmount the 5 percent barrier in national elections. The National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands; NPD), the oldest of the country’s right-wing parties, was formed in 1964 and gained little support in national elections, though it was able to enter several state parliaments in the late 1960s. In the 1980s and ’90s the Republicans and the DVU won seats in several state legislatures, with the Republicans’ support particularly concentrated in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and Berlin. The DVU, originally formed in 1971, achieved its electoral breakthrough in the 1990s, when it won representation in Schleswig-Holstein and fared particularly well in eastern Germany, where it won 13 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election in 1998. Although the rightist parties have distinct policies and have been unable to coalesce around a united platform, they share an antipathy toward Germany’s liberal immigration policies and have generally been regarded as neofascist in orientation. The NPD and DVU attempted to merge in 2010, but a legal challenge by a group of state DVU organizations successfully blocked the move.

The Pirate Party of Germany, an outgrowth of the larger Pirate Party movement that began in Sweden in 2006, promoted a broadly populist platform that focused on copyright reform and Internet freedom. The Pirate Party used open-source software to facilitate group decision making, a process the party called “liquid democracy.” In essence, the party’s entire platform was subject to electronic referendum by its members. Riding a wave of antiestablishment sentiment, the Pirates scored a string of electoral successes at the state level in 2011–12, winning representation in regional legislatures in Berlin, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein, and North Rhine–Westphalia.