German freedom party
The German Freedom Party was a Tyrolean party, which at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries had a major influence on Tyrolean politics and provided two outstanding political figures in Wilhelm Greil and Julius Perathoner .
history
The history of the liberal movement in Austria begins with the German Liberal Party , which was a bourgeois party in the Danube Monarchy. The German Liberal Party emerged from the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 and was significantly involved in the politics of the Danube Monarchy by providing two governments. In 1880 there was a turning point in the liberal movement when several German- liberal and German-national parties emerged from the weakened German Liberal Party .
In Tyrol the Liberals and National Liberals united in the German Freedom Party. Outstanding personalities of this party included Wilhelm Greil , Mayor of Innsbruck from 1896 to 1922, and Julius Perathoner, Mayor of Bolzano from 1895 to 1922 , and Max Markart , Mayor of Merano from 1923 to 1935 . In contrast to the Tyrolean People's Party , the liberal German Freedom Party advocated a strict separation of church and politics and primarily represented the urban bourgeoisie .
In order to better represent the German population of South Tyrol in relation to Italy, the German Freedom Party merged with the Catholic Tyrolean People's Party in 1919 to form the German Association , which received around 90 percent of the votes in the 1921 parliamentary elections (the remaining 10 percent went to the Social Democrats Party) and four MPs: Eduard Reut-Nicolussi , Karl Tinzl , Friedrich von Toggenburg and Wilhelm von Walther . The German Association formed the political foundation on which the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP) was founded after the end of the Second World War .
In the Austrian Tyrol (and also Vorarlberg, where it provided a district administrator in 1919 ) the party merged with the Greater German People's Party , the collective movement of the bourgeois-liberal German nationalists, in 1920/21 .
literature
- Lothar Höbelt : Cornflower and Imperial Eagle. The German freedom parties of Old Austria 1882–1918. Publishing house for history and politics, Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-7028-0320-3 .