I've come up with a weird little postwar German TL idea. How realistic it is, I don't know, but it is at least be a lot of fun to write so far!
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The 1949 German election was unusual in that it saw the occupation zones of the UK, US and France vote separately from the Soviet occupation zone, which at the time appeared to be establishing its own political system not unlike that of the Communist Eastern Bloc; historians generally agree that the government in the Soviet zone intended to pursue salami tactics to transition the government from a democratic form to simply consisting of communists and fellow travellers and establish it as a People’s Republic.
Despite the recently-formed Christian democratic CDU/CSU coalition’s leader Konrad Adenauer serving as president of the
Parlamentarischer Rat and having helped proclaim the Basic Law, the opposition SPD led by Kurt Schumacher came out ahead in terms of seats, with 141 to 129 for the CDU/CSU. Schumacher had made the SPD’s campaign unusually populist, mocking Adenauer for being ‘the Chancellor of the Allies’ and chastising his and his party’s perceived indifference to the country’s possible division; among the SPD’s slogans were ‘Ein Deutschland oder Zwei Deutschland?’ (‘One Germany or two Germanys?’), which also simultaneously attacked the party’s antipathy to social welfare.
202 seats were needed for a majority in the Bundestag, so neither party was able to hold one. The right-wing Bavarian Party (BP) and German Party (DP) won 17 seats each and the Communist Party (KPD) won 15, but most importantly the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) won 52, meaning it held the balance of power. As his party had won the popular vote and the most seats in the Bundestag, Schumacher approached the FDP leadership and found common ground with Theodor Huss, who was leader of the party in the West and Berlin. Schumacher pledged to focus his government’s programme around peaceful reunification and a more moderate economic policy in exchange for the FDP forming a coalition with his government, and despite the reluctance of many figures in both their parties, Huss accepted. In return, the SPD chose to support him as the first President of the new Republic rather than running one of their own, and he won the election in the Bundestag handily while Schumacher became Chancellor.
While the SPD-FDP coalition did not command a majority, as it held only 193 seats, it was generally able to secure support from moderate parties on constitutional matters and the Communists on welfare reforms (which also managed to allay the fears of politicians in the Soviet zone). The main success of the government was that it managed to halt the formation of a separatist government in the Soviet zone; Schumacher and Huss opened negotiations with the constitutional chairman and co-leader of the Socialist Unity Party (SED, formed from the Eastern SPD and KPD’s forced merge) Otto Grotewohl and with Joseph Stalin.
Unsurprisingly the Western zone government initially received a frosty reception, but Schumacher persevered, and offered several significant concessions to them. Most notably, despite their fierce hatred of the KPD (Schumacher had denounced them as ‘red-painted Nazis’), it was offered that the West would allow the party to freely compete in elections on the condition they demerged from the eastern SPD and respected the democratic process, and that Germany would be a neutral country, with its military to be deployed for multilateral international peacekeeping rather than warfare. These terms were also presented to the Western powers, with Schumacher allegedly telling US President Harry Truman ‘I will not be the man who lost Berlin’.
International tensions over the proposal were high, but eventually the Cölln Agreement (named for the district of Berlin at which Schumacher, Huss, Grotewohl and SED co-leader Wilhelm Pieck, who had initially objected to the negotiations, signed the document) was signed on the 15th July 1950, which has since become a public holiday known as Reunification Day in Germany. With one of his biggest goals achieved and his health declining, Schumacher resigned the Chancellorship; he would die two years later.
The race to succeed him was initially expected to be won resoundingly by Schumacher’s ally Erich Ollenhauer, but with the SED collapsing, Grotewohl and his supporters rejoined the SPD, leading to a tense clash for the leadership. This tension within the SPD was balanced out by the ascension of the CDU’s Jakob Kaiser and the FDP’s Waldemar Koch. While Ollenhauer narrowly prevailed over Grotewohl, Kaiser and Koch defeated Adenauer and Franz Blücher to become the CDU/CSU and FDP’s new leaders, partly due to their eastern members feeling left out in the cold by their predecessors’ focus on the west. Ironically, those two parties making easterners their new leaders alienated them from many westerners, while Ollenhauer’s closeness to Schumacher and moderate ideology made him largely appealing to German voters.
With the nation in a deeply uncertain position despite its newly reunified status, once he became SPD leader and Chancellor in September, Ollenhauer approached President Huss and convinced him to back another election, pledging to support a continued SPD/FPD coalition. Huss agreed, and a new election was called for February 1951 (allowing time for electoral reform to allow the eastern states to join; the Bundestag went from 242 single-member districts to 336 and from 140 PR seats to 224).
The Bundestag elected in 1951 was far less divided than that of 1949, both in terms of what part of the country participated and in terms of its parliamentary arithmetic. The SPD came out far ahead of the CDU/CSU (particularly in the districts, where it took 213 to the CDU/CSU’s 89), and came close to an overall majority in their own right, comfortably holding one cushioned by the FDP. Every party elected in 1949 in the West except the German Right Party (a minor fascist party) remained in the Bundestag, and the agrarian DBD that had won seats in the east entered it via the PR lists.
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(By the way, apologies for not properly calculating the second vote seats, I’m not good enough at electoral maths to know how to do that.)
