Local council elections in Styria in 1932

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The municipal council elections in Styria in 1932 were held on April 24th of this year. They brought losses for the bourgeois parties and the Social Democrats and profits for the Communists and National Socialists . Local council elections in Carinthia and regional elections in Lower Austria , Salzburg and Vienna also took place at the same time .

Comments on the evaluation

An exact evaluation of these municipal council elections is not possible for Styria as there is no official final result. Furthermore, due to the legal provisions in force at the time, almost half of the Styrian municipalities did not vote at all. According to Section 7 of the State Law of March 28, 1924, which was still in force in 1932 , the election could be omitted in municipalities where only one election proposal had been submitted and this contained the number of candidates necessary for the municipal council to be complete . A total of 446 municipalities in Styria made use of this option, while elections were held in 582 municipalities.

Ultimately, various newspapers can only take the election results of 351 Styrian municipalities and therefore evaluate them. Apart from a few exceptions, however, these do not contain any eligible voters, which is why the electoral figures of the National Council election of 1930 are generally used as the basis for calculation for election analyzes . Another problem arises from the fact that, especially in the middle-class camp, a large number of campaigning groups, mostly with a purely local connection, ran for the election. Often they formed joint lists and introduced themselves as " economic bloc ", " business party ", " stands block ", " stands covenant ," " stands representation " and so the election. An exact breakdown of the bourgeois forces is therefore not possible, but only a comparison of “bourgeois” or “ right ” and “ Marxist ” or “ left ” parties.

Results

The main loser in the election was the bourgeois party bloc, including above all the Greater German People's Party , whose electorate was almost completely "absorbed" by the National Socialists in this year's Austrian ballots. The position of the Greater Germans in Styria was already so weakened at the time of the election that, with the exception of the city of Deutschlandsberg, they only ran for the municipal council elections in coalition with other campaigning groups. Overall, the share of bourgeois parties - measured by the valid votes - in the 351 evaluable municipalities fell from 59.0% (in the municipal council election in 1928) to 54.1%. The Social Democratic Party's share of the vote fell from 39.5% to 35.9%. In addition to the National Socialists, the Communists were among the winners, even though they still represented an extremely small political minority with a share of 1.8% (1928: 0.2%). The NSDAP achieved 8.2% (1928: 1.3%), although it should be noted that the National Socialists were only able to apply for candidacy in 122 municipalities due to their relatively low level of organization at the time in Styria. Taking this into account, their share of the votes in the 122 of the 351 evaluable municipalities increases to 13.2% (based on the eligible voters 11.6%). This means that Styria still lagged behind Carinthia , where the NSDAP came in at 15.7% (on the basis of eligible voters) in 98 of the 212 municipalities with their own NS candidacy. In contrast to the election result in Styria, that in Carinthia was exactly “in trend” against the background of the election results in Lower Austria , Salzburg and Vienna .

Too high or too low results with regard to the performance of the NSDAP are mentioned above all in the older literature. Gerhard Jagschitz, for example, speaks of a National Socialist vote share of 20.0% for Carinthia and 16.0% for Styria and erroneously dates the elections to March and April 1933. Stefan Karner, on the other hand, only mentions a national NS vote share of 3 for Styria , 0% and refers to a result published in the Styrian State Law Gazette.

literature

References and comments

  1. ↑ Hänisch (1998), p. 102, who refers to the Grazer Zeitung of April 30, 1932 and points out that there apparently ten municipalities were specified too many because the total exceeds the total number of Styrian municipalities (1,018 in total) .
  2. ↑ For further details regarding the problem of the analysis of the municipal council elections in 1932 cf. Hänisch (1998), p. 102f.
  3. ↑ Gerald M. Wolf: "Now we are the masters ..." The NSDAP in the Deutschlandsberg district and the July putsch in 1934 (= Grazer Zeitgeschichtliche Studien, Volume 3). StudienVerlag, Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen 2008, p. 82, note 155.
  4. ↑ Hänisch (1998), p. 100f. and 104.
  5. ^ Gerhard Jagschitz: On the structure of the NSDAP in Austria before the July coup 1934 . In: Ludwig Jedlicka and Rudolf Neck (eds.): The year 1934: July 25th. Protocol of the symposium in Vienna on October 8, 1974 (= publications of the Scientific Commission of the Theodor Körner Foundation Fund and the Leopold Kunschak Prize for Research into Austrian History from 1927 to 1938, Vol. 3) Vienna 1975, p. 9 –20, here p. 11.
  6. ^ Karner Stefan: Styria in the Third Reich 1938-1945. Aspects of their political, economic-social and cultural development. 3rd edition, Graz 1994, pp. 28 and 479, note 12.