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“Tomorrow all voters must go to the polls to vote for the first Federal Parliament. Those who do not vote now will obviously have no right to complain later.” On the evening of Saturday, August 13, 1949, Wilhelm Kayssen, President of the Bremen Parliament, called for the first elections in the Federal Republic of Germany in a radio broadcast.
It was the first free election in 17 years, after Adolf Hitler abolished democracy and Nazism came to power. Germany was in ruins, the country had just been formed – only four years after the Second World War. Now, just a few months after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, the time had come again: on August 14, Germans were asked to elect a parliament in free and democratic elections.
“These were not only the first federal elections, but also the first free elections since the autumn of 1932, in the final phase of the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic,” historian Benedikt Wintgens explained to DW. In between came “the collapse of civilization and the Second World War with all its consequences.” “In this respect, it was a new beginning for voting, democracy and for the creation of a state framework that had not existed,” he added.
However, not all Germans could vote. After the war, the country was divided into occupation zones administered by the four victorious powers. The Western Three—the United States, Britain, and France—allowed elections, while the Soviet Union imposed a communist system in its eastern occupation zone without free elections.
As tensions between the three Western powers and the Soviet Union worsened, the parliaments of the Western occupation zones convened a parliamentary council, which drafted a constitution and approved a law regulating parliamentary elections.
The German election campaign remains a patchwork of small events with lots of improvisation and personal promises from constituency candidates.
Two-party dominance
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) remain the two largest political parties in Germany today and have come to dominate the political arena.
The CDU had strong representatives: Konrad Adenauer, who chaired the parliamentary committee and ran for the position of Federal Chancellor, and Ludwig Erhard, the father of monetary reform and free market economics. Both advocated the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the Western world and the strengthening of the market economy. The Social Democratic Party candidate was Kurt Schumacher.
Coalition Government
The turnout on Sunday, August 14, was high: 78.5%. The two main parties were almost tied: the CDU with 31% and the SPD with 29.2%. A total of eight parties and three independent candidates who were directly elected in their constituencies succeeded in getting into the Bundestag.
The CDU formed a coalition with the Freedom Party (FDP) and the then German Party (DP), and at the meeting on September 15, the Bundestag elected Konrad Adenauer as the first federal chancellor with a majority of only one vote.
Adenauer and his economics minister Ludwig Erhard not only created the “economic miracle” of the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, but also caused political and social stagnation in the country. The SPD had to play the role of an opposition party until 1967, when it formed a broad coalition with the CDU.
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