Volkskammer election 1990
The Volkskammer election in 1990 was the last election to the People's Chamber in the GDR and the only one that complied with democratic principles. It took place on March 18, 1990. The election was originally scheduled for May 6, 1990, but due to the tumultuous events after the fall of the Berlin Wall (e.g. ten-point program of November 28, 1989, general agreement on two-plus-four talks on February 13, 1990) and the need to establish a government capable of acting and legitimized , the Volkskammer election was brought forward six weeks. The term of office of the then incumbent Modrow government thereby shortened.
The turnout was 93.4% of 12,426,192 eligible voters. The winner was the alliance Alliance for Germany , consisting of the former bloc party CDU with the top candidate Lothar de Maizière , the newly founded German Social Union (DSU, close to the CSU ) and the Democratic Awakening (DA). The top candidate of the DSU was Hans-Wilhelm Ebeling , the top candidate of the DA was Wolfgang Schnur . Three days before the election, Schnur's activity as an unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) was deliberately disclosed.
The newly founded Social Democratic Party in the GDR (originally SDP, abbreviated as SPD at the time of the election), which was rated as the favorite until election day , only received 22% of the vote. Your top candidate Ibrahim Böhme was later exposed as an unofficial employee of the MfS and expelled from the SPD in 1992.
Election mode and voting procedure
On February 20, 1990, the 9th People's Chamber passed a new electoral law. Accordingly, 400 mandates were available . It was a pure proportional representation without a threshold clause . List associations were permitted. This possibility was also used, for example in the form of the Bund Free Democrats , Bündnis 90 , a list association made up of the Greens and Independent Women's Association , the United Left Action Alliance and the Alternative Youth List (AJL). The entire GDR was an electoral area. The seat allocation carried out by the method Hare-Niemeyer . In this way, parties and electoral associations were able to send representatives to the People's Chamber from around half a mandate (0.125%).
Result
| Political party | be right | percent | Mandates |
|---|---|---|---|
| CDU | 4,710,552 | 40.8 | 163 |
| SPD | 2,525,473 | 21.9 | 88 |
| PDS | 1,892,329 | 16.4 | 66 |
| DSU | 727.716 | 6.3 | 25th |
| BFD | 608.918 | 5.3 | 21st |
| Alliance 90 | 336.064 | 2.9 | 12 |
| DBD | 251.210 | 2.2 | 9 |
| Greens / UFV | 226.921 | 2.0 | 8th |
| THERE | 106.146 | 0.9 | 4th |
| NDPD | 44,296 | 0.4 | 2 |
| DFD | 38,190 | 0.3 | 1 |
| AVL ( VL & The Carnations ) | 20,340 | 0.2 | 1 |
| AJL | 14,615 | 0.1 | |
| CHRISTIAN LEAGUE | 10,691 | 0.1 | |
| KPD | 8,819 | 0.1 | |
| USPD | 3,891 | 0.0 | |
| EFP | 3,636 | 0.0 | |
| RRP | 3,007 | 0.0 | |
| DBU | 2,534 | 0.0 | |
| SpAD | 2,417 | 0.0 | |
| Unit now | 2,396 | 0.0 | |
| BSA | 386 | 0.0 | |
| VAA | 380 | 0.0 | |
| Valid votes | 11,540,927 | 92.87 | |
| Invalid votes | 63.263 | 0.51 | |
| be right | 11,604,190 | 93.38 | |
| Non-voters | 822.002 | 6.62 | |
| Eligible voters | 12,426,192 | 100 |
Remarks:
The European Union of the GDR was allowed to vote, but did not run.
Election programs
For the first time, citizens had the choice between parties with different goals and party programs.
The 'Alliance for Germany' put its election program under the title “Never again socialism”. The key points were the demand for German unity on the basis of the Basic Law , the immediate introduction of the D-Mark in the event of a conversion of savings balances in a ratio of 1 to 1, private property and unrestricted freedom of trade, abolition of all access barriers for investors from the West, establishment of a social safety net ( Unemployment insurance, health insurance, co-determination, dynamic pensions), an immediate program for the environment and a secure energy supply as well as the standardization of the law with the Federal Republic of Germany and in particular the abolition of political criminal law. Further points were the promotion of monument protection, an educational reform, the preservation of the day nurseries, the reintroduction of the states and freedom of the press.
At the first party congress (February 22-25, 1990 in Leipzig), the basic program of the Eastern SPD and its election program for the Volkskammer election were adopted. The core was the demand for an ecologically oriented social market economy .
The electoral program of the PDS was entitled “Democratic Freedom for All - Social Security for Everyone”. The PDS described itself as a left / socialist party that advocates a humane world of work and strives for a socially and ecologically oriented market economy that, on the basis of high performance, aims to provide social security for everyone, especially the socially disadvantaged. In addition, she addressed the demand for radical disarmament in East and West, solidarity between people and the responsible interaction of people with nature. Social values and achievements of the GDR should be preserved. The PDS understood this to mean, among other things, the right to work , the system of children's institutions, cooperative and public property in the economy, and anti-fascism and internationalism. Central were also demands to maintain the status quo with regard to the continued employment of former SED members and the results of the land reform . Instead of German unity, the formation of confederate structures while preserving statehood , the gradual transition to a neutral and demilitarized German confederation within the framework of European unification was called for.
Election campaign
The election campaign for the Volkskammer election was short and presented the parties with major organizational challenges. The elections originally scheduled for May 1990 were brought forward to March 18 on January 28, 1990 in negotiations between representatives of the round table and the Modrow government . This meant that only seven weeks were available for the election campaign.
Only the SED, renamed PDS, had a party machine that was immediately operational and extensive financial resources for the election campaign. The SPD seemed to have by far the best starting conditions for this election: The Saxon and Thuringian areas in particular had been strongholds of the SPD during the Weimar Republic . There were no significant Catholic milieus in the GDR (except in Eichsfeld ) that could have given the Christian Democrats a natural basis. For this reason, among other things, the election forecasts predicted a clear victory for the Social Democrats. At the beginning of February the SPD was 54 percent in a published survey, followed by the PDS with 12 percent and the CDU with 11 percent.
Facing a massive dilemma the bourgeois parties were: the Liberal and Christian Democratic parties founded in 1945 were in the late 1940s to block parties gleichgeschaltet Service. These “recorders” had functioning organizations. However, there were serious doubts about the ability of these parties to symbolize credible change. The newly founded groups and citizens' movements did not have a stable organization, some were still in the middle of program debates and had only a minimal infrastructure. For the Union parties , there were two additional aspects: The CSU had found a partner for the Volkskammer election in the DSU. A success of the DSU might have rekindled the discussion about the Fourth Party and a nationwide expansion of the CSU . And above all: The CDU (East) had the name and thus the trademark of the West CDU. As a stopgap measure, the Federation of Free Democrats for the FDP and the Alliance for Germany were brought into being. These alliances, forged six weeks before the election, had to organize their election campaign against the overwhelming power of the PDS in the shortest possible time.
In many places civil rights activists had enforced that offices (often as houses of democracy ) were made available to them. Both the new groups and the parties lacked infrastructure and experience in election campaigns. This gap was closed by massive engagement of the Western parties.
All parties in the West support their partner parties in the GDR to a large extent and were thus able to more than make up for the organizational lead of the SED / PDS. The CDU, for example, formed district partnerships: each district in the GDR was supported by a district in the Federal Republic of Germany . Many members of the West took vacation to support the alliance in the election campaign.
The decisive factor, however, was obviously not the strength of the organization, but the credibility in the promise of an approximation of economic conditions and the creation of national unity. While the SPD chancellor candidate Oskar Lafontaine a reunion was skeptical (he warned at the Berlin Congress of the SPD on 18 December 1989 against "national drunkenness" and assessed a membership of a united Germany in NATO as "historical nonsense"), for operation of the CDU Chairman and Chancellor Helmut Kohl aggressively launched the reunification (among other things with his ten-point program ).
In order to promote this position, almost 400 events were held with around 80 top politicians from the Union parties during the election campaign. In addition, 1,400 election events of the alliance took place. The support of parts of the SPD to give in to Honecker's demands in Gera and, for example, to end the funding of the central registration office of the state justice administrations by the SPD states was discussed.
Ultimately, the decisive factor in the election was the desire of the majority of the population for economic and political reunification. A clear sign of this was the number of visitors to Helmut Kohl's election campaign events. On February 20, 1990, 150,000 supporters cheered him in Erfurt , 200,000 in Chemnitz , and hundreds of thousands more followed in the major cities of the GDR.
The final phase of the election campaign was determined by the unveiling of Wolfgang Schnur's Stasi worker by Der Spiegel a few days before the election.
There were also critical voices about these elections, their preparation and the state of the social environment in which they took place. The writer Michael Schneider criticized what he saw as massive interference by federal politics in the GDR election campaign as follows:
“A total of around 40 million DM was spent on the party-political advertising campaign in the GDR, a considerable part of which came from taxpayers' money. (...) 100,000 records and cassettes with three speeches by Helmut Kohl (...) were partly sent over there individually, partly distributed directly to his Leipzig and Erfurt fans during Kohl's campaign appearances. (...) In Erfurt, for example, Hessian CDU members who were carted in with eight buses put up 80,000 posters in a single night. (...) The West Germans (discovered) in the GDR, which had suddenly become accessible to them, a terrain on which a piece of missed colonial history can be made up for (...). "
The civil rights activist Jens Reich , one of the founders of the New Forum , commented on the question of the development of democracy in the GDR in 2009:
“The Bonn hippopotamus came so massively that one was simply helpless. In the election campaign, the entire Western apparatusism was simply brought to the East. We had nothing to counter that. These were western elections exported to the GDR. "
Government formation
The newly elected People's Chamber was constituted on April 5, 1990. After lengthy negotiations, Lothar de Maizière formed a grand coalition of the Alliance, the SPD and the Liberals ( Government de Maizière ). On April 12, 1990, he was elected Prime Minister of the GDR by the People's Chamber with 265 votes, 108 against and 9 abstentions . The MPs then also confirmed the de Maizière government en bloc.
Milestones in parliamentary activity are the adoption of the local constitution of the GDR of May 17, 1990, the constitutional principles law of June 17, 1990 and the treaty on monetary, economic and social union with the Federal Republic of Germany of May 18, 1990, which came into effect on May 1, 1990. July 1990 came into force. On June 21, 1990, the People's Chamber formed a special committee to monitor the dissolution of the MfS / AfNS ; Joachim Gauck , who was then one of the initiators of the Stasi Records Act , became chairman .
On August 23, 1990, the GDR joined the Federal Republic with effect from October 3, 1990 (according to Art. 23 GG old version , see Unification Treaty ), and the People's Chamber dissolved. Their legislative period therefore only lasted a good six months. 144 of the 400 members of the Volkskammer became members of the Bundestag as of October 3, 1990 : 63 from the CDU, 8 from the DSU, 9 from the Liberals, 33 from the SPD, 7 together from Bündnis 90 and the Green Party and 24 from the PDS. Their mandates ended a few months later with the first all-German federal election on December 2, 1990.
On October 2, 1990, the last day of the existence of the GDR, Gauck was elected by the Volkskammer as special commissioner for the personal documents of the former state security service of the GDR and on the following day by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker and Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl as special commissioner of the Federal Government for the personal documents of the former State Security Service confirmed in this function.
Trivia
- With 44,292 votes (0.4%), the NDPD had more members at the time of the election (according to its own information about 110,000) than voters.
- The outcome of the election was the subject of heated controversy among political scientists. While Dieter Roth in the Politische Vierteljahresschrift attributes the high proportion of votes for the CDU to their clear demand for reunification , Carsten Bluck and Henry Kreikenbom put possible party ties to the fore in the journal for parliamentary questions .
- The American company Atari provided 80 computers for the election .
See also
- List of members of the People's Chamber of the GDR (10th electoral period)
- Political Parties Act (GDR)
literature
- Bettina Tüffers: The 10th People's Chamber of the GDR. A parliament in upheaval. Self-perception, self-parliamentarization, self-dissolution, Düsseldorf 2016, ISBN 978-3-7700-5333-9 .
- Russell J. Dalton (Ed.): The New Germany Votes. Unification and the Creation of a New German Party System. Berg, Providence RI u. a. 1993, ISBN 0-85496-386-3 (English).
Web links
- Wahlrecht.de - Election results of the Volkskammer election 1990 in absolute numbers
- People's Chamber Election Act (PDF file; 34 kB)
Individual evidence
- ^ Wahlrecht.de: Official final result of the elections to the 10th People's Chamber on March 18, 1990
- ↑ Never again socialism - election call and immediate program of the Alliance for Germany for the Volkskammer election in the GDR on March 18, 1990 (PDF; 4.4 MB)
- ↑ For the Leipzig basic program see: Dieter Dowe , Kurt Klotzbach (Hrsg.): Programmatic documents of the German social democracy (= politics in the pocket book. 2). 3rd, revised and updated edition. J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., Bonn 1990, ISBN 3-8012-0100-7 , pp. 447-490.
- ^ Election program of the PDS
- ↑ Kai Diekmann , Ralf Georg Reuth : Helmut Kohl: "I wanted Germany's unity". 3. Edition. Propylaeen, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-549-05597-8 , p. 288 ff.
- ↑ Kai Diekmann, Ralf Georg Reuth: Helmut Kohl: "I wanted Germany's unity". 3. Edition. Propylaea, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-549-05597-8 , p. 316.
- ↑ Michael Schneider : The aborted revolution. From the state company to the DM colony (= Elefanten-Press. 371). Verlag Elefanten-Press, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88520-371-5 , p. 114 ff.
- ^ Civil rights activist Jens Reich: "Politics is not my job" . FOCUS-Online-Special 20 years of transition , November 4, 2009.
- ↑ BStU annual review 1989/90. In: BStU.Bund.de ; Appointment decision in the 9th session of the 10th People's Chamber on May 31, 1990, see video and decision (PDF) at the German Bundestag.
- ^ Andreas Herbst, Winfried Ranke, Jürgen Winkler: This is how the GDR worked . Volume 2, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1994, s. v. “National Democratic Party of Germany”, p. 715.
- ^ A b Eckhard Jesse: The "party system" of the GDR. In: Oskar Niedermayer (Ed.): Handbook of political party research. Springer, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-531-17698-7 , p. 729.
- ↑ Dieter Roth: The elections to the People's Chamber in the GDR. Trying to explain . In: Political quarterly . No. 31 , 1990, pp. 369-393 .
- ^ Carsten Bluck, Henry Kreikenbom: The voters in the GDR. Only issue-oriented or also party-bound? In: Journal for Parliamentary Issues . tape 22 , 1991, pp. 495-502 .
- ^ ST-Computer 7-8 / 90: Let's Go East - ATARI Club in the GDR. Accessed April 30, 2020 .
- ↑ Episode 4: Suddenly representatives of the people. Podcast "Meine Wende - Our Unity?" . In: zdf.de . November 14, 2019, accessed November 20, 2019.
