The 1955 German federal election was held on the 6th February 1955, with the SPD-led government of Erich Ollenhauer seeking a third term as Chancellor.
Ollenhauer’s government had been greatly influential in the preceding term, as it had produced substantial reforms to expand the German welfare state, most notably the introduction of statutory health insurance (SHI) to cover pensioners, the disabled and other marginalized groups and reformed income taxes to cut individual income tax rates for the poor in favour of only affecting incomes above 250,000 Deutschmarks. The country’s economic output rose significantly in the early 1950s, and many Germans were becoming more prosperous- Ollenhauer’s government is said to have started the boom period known as the
Wirtschaftswunder, meaning ‘economic miracle’ or as it is more commonly known in English, ‘Miracle on the Rhine’.
Despite these successes, international relations and social issues were proving to be contentious. Ollenhauer continued the policy of ‘denazification’ by convicting senior officials connected to the Nazi regime and its war crimes, as well as seeking to distance the postwar German state from Nazism through actions such as paying compensation to the Jewish Claims Conference and the Israeli government and replacing the infamous
Deutschlandlied national anthem with one by the poet and anti-Nazi Rudolf Alexander Schröder entitled
Hymne an Deutschland (‘Hymn to Germany’).
These moves were met with significant backlash, as they angered conservatives who felt former Nazis should be allowed to return to public life and that continuing to punish them would foster nationalism and make them martyrs, and Ollenhauer subsequently angered those on the left when as public pressure on his government grew he began to commute the sentences of more minor offenders, as they saw him as a Nazi apologist for doing so.
A major policy plank of Ollenhauer’s government in terms of foreign policy was what became known as
Mittelpolitik (‘middle politics’), by which Germany sought to renounce its militaristic past and adopt a more peaceful and anti-imperialist role in the Cold War. With the encouragement of the Western Allies, Germany’s army was restored and the US established a military presence in Germany, but Ollenhauer and President Huss passed a reform to the constitution somewhat inspired by Article 9 of the Japanese postwar constitution that renounced declaring or deploying its army for war and rejected the offer of nuclear armament. The SPD also rejected overtures to join NATO or sign the Treaty of Paris and tried instead to establish trade links with both western and eastern European nations alike, which the opposition vocally criticized them for and would ultimately reverse by retroactively joining the European Coal and Steel Community and signing the Treaty of Rome.
By 1955, hopes of a more cooperative relationship with eastern Europe after new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to power were not coming to fruition, and the opposition CDU/CSU and more conservative voices in the FDP saw Ollenhauer’s leadership as a threat to Germany’s position both economically and with the West.
The CDU had, in the early 1950s, had a leadership struggle between Jakob Kaiser and Adenauer’s heir Ludwig Erhard after Kaiser led the party to a resounding defeat in 1951. Erhard won the leadership, but conceded a lot of major political stances to Kaiser’s wing of the party, which promoted views influenced by Christian socialism and was popular with poorer religious voters. Most notably, despite his support for Adenauer’s lifting of price controls, he advocated for what he called the ‘social market economy’, an economic model he claimed was influenced by Bismarck to represent an egalitarian support for welfare for the poorest in society.
While the CDU was moving to the centre, the right started to be occupied by more extreme forces aided by the softening of denazification. The German Party (DP) had won seats in the prior two elections and carved out a recognizable profile for itself as a Protestant, monarchist and state’s rights party most powerful in its home state of Lower Saxony, but since the 1951 election had merged with a small party called the All-German Bloc/Expellee’s Rights Party (GB/BHE), which ostensibly advocated for the rights of Germans expelled from the eastern regions that had been annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after the Second World War but was in danger of being outlawed as unconstitutional for its sympathies to Nazism. The BP ran on a platform opposed to economic intervention, supporting the establishment of a constitutional monarchy as a bulwark against communism and increasing the amount of people to be pardoned for involvement with the Nazi regime.
Ironically, some figures have suggested that the DP’s surge- which did not correspond to holding the balance of power as many politicians feared- actually benefitted the CDU, as it caused Ollenhauer to vocally denounce it and alienate voters, distanced Erhard and his party from the German right’s past and helped convince President Heuss to allow the FDP’s leadership to choose not to commit to continuing the party’s coalition with the SPD.
Further hurting the SPD was a shift in philosophy in the KPD. The large membership in the east had grown dissatisfied with Max Reimann’s leadership and the hardline Stalinist Walter Ullbricht successfully challenged him for the leadership, but after Stalin’s death in 1953 Ullbricht was himself challenged by the more moderate Stefan Heym. Heym would begin the process of reforming the KPD’s policy platform into what would later become known as ‘Eurocommunist’ ideology, and the Khrushchev Thaw and the marginalisation of Stalinists in the party had temporarily softened public fears about the KPD. As a result, it would enjoy its best performance since before the Second World War in the 1955 election, and Heym would serve as party leader for almost two decades.
When the election was held, the CDU came out comfortably ahead of the SPD in a near-reversal of the latter’s 1951 victory; it was the first time since 1907 that a party besides the SPD or the Nazis had won the most seats at a German election. The CDU only took 238 seats, 43 short of a majority, but formed a coalition with the FDP and the Centre Party (Z), the latter alliance with the moderate Catholic party being a largely symbolic move as it was taken reinforce the
cordon sanitaire against the more extremist and Protestant BP.
This election would be the last one before the Saarland was reincorporated into Germany in 1957.