Social Democratic Union
The Social Democratic Union ( SDU ) was a party that emerged around 1977 from parts of the right wing of the SPD . At times the SDU had up to 5000 members and was represented nationwide in several city and local councils. It was strongest in North Rhine-Westphalia .
Politician
The leading figures of the SDU were the Braunschweiger Oberstadtdirektor Hans-Günther Weber as chairman, the Moerser surveying engineer and former Krefeld SPD member of the state parliament Willi Sinncker as well as the Krefeld city director and former SPD member of the Bundestag Karl-Heinz Stienen . The origins of the top politicians also largely explain the party's focus in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Founding party conference and basic program
Some of the founding members of the SDU had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag archipelago in the mid-seventies and, under this impression, at the founding party congress on 17/18. June 1977 in the Mönchengladbacher Dorint-Hotel decided on the SDU basic program. It was intended as anti- Marxist and in parts a direct confrontation with the Godesberg program of the SPD. Therefore it takes up ideological core principles of the Godesberg program and tries to reveal or present them as socialist and then to refute them.
development
The roughly presented anti-communism of the SDU, which could hardly be understood from the program alone , meant that it found itself as a splinter party within the right-wing party spectrum soon after it was founded. She looked in vain for references to the CSU of Franz Josef Strauss . Since the SDU was unable to achieve a resounding success in a state election in the following years, despite successes at the city and municipal level , it increasingly lost its importance and therefore had to lose its status as a national party in 1979 . At an “extraordinary federal party convention” in June 1979 in Braunschweig, the SDU was dissolved and it was decided to transform it into an “anti-socialist electoral assembly”.
Individual evidence
- ^ Voters' initiative as a point of contention between the CDU and CSU . Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 3./4. February 1979, p. 6
- ↑ unsung dissolved in: Forward . No. 26 of 21 June 1979, p 2 (Newsflash)