Keeping the British Liberal Party flag flying high

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pipisme

A federal election took place in Canada on 15 June 1953. The number of MPs elected for each party was as follows [election on 9 May 1949]:
Liberal: 103 [138]
Progressive Conservative: 79 [65]
Commonwealth Co-operative Federation (CCF): 63 [44]
Social Credit: 13 [10]
Independent: 3 [4]
Independent Liberal: 2 [-]
Liberal-Labour: 1 [-]
Liberal-Progressive: 1 [1]
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Total: 245 [242]
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Alphonse Fournier continued as Prime Minister this time at the head of a Liberal minority government with CCF support.
 

pipisme

After the rather disappointing performance of the Progressive Conservative Party in the general election, and with the likelihood that Alphonse Fournier would call a general election in the near future, party activists called upon the leader, George Drew to resign. He had lost two general elections. In September 1953 he resigned and at the party convention in Toronto, Donald Fleming was elected leader.

Fournier called a federal election for 8 March 1954. The number of MPs elected for each party was as follows [May 1953 election]:
Commonwealth Co-operative Federation (CCF): 104 [63]
Conservative: 92 [79]
Liberal: 57 [103]
Social Credit: 9 [13]
Independents: 2 [3]
Liberal-Labour: 1 [1]
[Independent Liberal:2]
[ Liberal_Progressive: 1]
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Total: 265 [265]
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The leader of the CCF, John Diefenbaker, became Prime Minister.
 
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pipisme

Having read more about Diefenbaker and the CCF I have decided to retcon my previous post. Diefenbaker was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in September 1953. In the March 1954 federal election the Progressive Conservatives won 102 seats and the CCF 94 seats. The other parties were the same as in my previous post.
 
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pipisme

The Liberal defeat was devastating and worse than anyone expected. Of the 57 Liberal MPs elected, 35 were from Quebec, 12 from Toronto, 5 from Newfoundland and Labrador, 3 from New Brunswick, and 2 from Manitoba.

John Diefenbaker became Prime Minister at the head of a minority Conservative government.
 

pipisme

Within a week of the federal election on 8 March 1954, Alphonse Fournier resigned as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. At the Liberal leadership convention in Ottawa in April, Joseph James Guillaime Paul Martin [commonly called Paul Martin] was elected leader on the first ballot. He was on the left wing of the Liberal Party and his policy was to win voters who left the Liberals for the CCF. In this TL Lester Pearson was Secretary-General of the League of Nations. [1]

Diefenbaker called a federal election for 24 March 1958. The number of MPs elected for each party was as follows [March 1957 general election]:
Liberal: 106 [57]
Progressive Conservative: 83 [102]
Commonwealth Co-operative Federation (CCF): 69 [94]
Social Credit: 6 [9]
Liberal-Labour: 1 [1]
[Independents:2]
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Total: 265 [265]
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Paul Martin became Prime Minister at the head of a minority Liberal government.

[1] In OTL Pearson became leader of the Liberal Party in 1957.
 
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pipisme

A general election on 13 October 1957 was held in the German Federation to elect deputies to the Reichstag. The number of deputies elected for each party was as follows [election on 15 October 1953]:
Social Democratic Party: 217 [289]
Conservative People's Party: 182 [118]
Christian Democratic Party: 139 [151]
Liberal Party: 53 [80]
German Social National Workers Party: 46 [2]
Communist Party: 32 [27]
Austrian Independence Party: 12 [14]
Czech deputies: 4 [4]
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Total: 685 [685]
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pipisme

Much of the comments on the result of the general election in the German Federation was about the large increase in the number of deputies of the German Social National Workers Party [DSNAP] from two to forty-six. They tried to keep a balance between complacency and exaggerated alarm. It was pointed out that while the DSNAP won only seven percent of the vote that was more than four percent higher that the 2.6% the Nazi Party received in the 1928 federal election. There were acres of newsprint and hours of radio and television analysis and theories of the rise in the DSNAP vote. It was said that DSNAP voters were not only former Nazis who had done well in the Third Reich from March 1933 to March 1939, but those who felt left out of the prosperity of much of the Federation. The highest votes for the DSNAP were in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Schelswig Holstein and the Sudetenland. In a few places in these areas. they obtained up to a quarter of the vote. There was a strong correlation between areas of electoral strength for the DSNAP and for the Nazi Party. Their lowest vote was in Berlin, the Rhineland, Bremen and Hamburg.
 

pipisme

Letter dated 16 October 1957 from Sophie Rosenbaum [nee Fischer] to her friend Rosa Bancroft:
My dearest Rosa,

I hope you and Gwilym and the children are well.

No doubt you have heard about our general election and the Nazis winning 46 seats and becoming the fifth largest party in the Reichstag. There was a huge anti Nazi demonstration in Berlin yesterday with hundreds of thousands taking part. Our slogan was 'Never Again'. I was there with Salomon and our seven children, and Mum and Dad, and my brothers Philipp and Karl. There were speeches from survivors of the concentration camps and Jewish comrades, and other people who had suffered under the Nazis. I never thought I would but I spoke. I said that I am proud to be Jewish, a Social Democrat and German and this is my country. I was beaten up by Nazi thugs nineteen years ago. The Nazis want to deport me and my husband and our children, who are here with me, because we are Jewish. They want to ban all what they call, anti German political parties which means the Social Democrats and the Communists. We will resist them to the death if necessary.' There were Christian Democrat and Liberals speakers, even a Conservative. He said that he would leave the Conservative People's Party if it went into coalition with the Nazis. It was such a very inspiring demonstration. At the end we passed a resolution, nearly unanimously, that if the Nazis entered government trade unions would call a general strike.

Your loving friend

Sophie
Click to expand...

Sophie gave birth to her seventh child, a boy, on 6 February 1957. She and Salomon now have four boys and three girls.
 
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Cylon_Number_14

Great use of a recurring character to move the story and address readers’ concerns. And wow it’s been 19 years since the awful assault on Sophie!
 

pipisme

Sophie's husband, Salomon, was a set designer at the Babelberg film studio in Berlin. He had been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two and half years from September 1936 to March 1939. Her father [Wilhelm Fischer] was sixty-one years old and a Social Democrat member of Berlin city council. Her mother, Kathe, was fifty-eight years old and the chief costume designer with the Deutsches National Theatre in Berlin. The Theatre staged both classic and modern plays. It had a policy of staging innovative, exciting and challenging plays. It was vehemently.opposed by the German Social National Workers Party [DSNAP] who accused it of peddling anti German Jewish Marxist filth. They didn't want to close it down but take it over to put on plays which conformed to their ideology, and dismiss all the Jewish workers, and those they deemed politically undesirable.

Philipp, the elder of her two brothers, was a GP in the working class Neukolln district of Berlin. Karl, the younger brother, was a solicitor.
 

pipisme

Because no party had at least 343 seats and an overall majority in the Reichstag a coalition of two or more parties would be necessary. The alternatives were a Social Democrat/Christian Democrat coalition which would have 356 seats and if the Liberals were added 409 seats, or a Conservative People's Party/Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition which would have 374 seats.

After the death of Joseph Wirth, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party, on 3 January 1956, the party elected Eugen Gerstenmaier as their leader. [1] He continued their coalition with the Social Democrats. After the October 1957 general election he was in favour of continuing the coalition, but the Christian Democrats were split and a large minority in the party wanted to go into coalition with the Conservatives. However the majority of Christian Democrats were aligned ideologically to the Social Democrats, and they objected to people like Hans Globke and Theodor Oberlander who were prominent in the Conservative People's Party. Globke helped to formulate the Enabling Act of 1933 which established the Nazi dictatorship, and was responsible for drafting anti semitic laws from 1935 to 1938. [2] Theodor Oberlander was politically active in the Third Reich. [3]

[1] Here is his entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Gerstenmaier

[2] Here is his entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke

[3] Here is the Wikipedia entry for Oberlander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Oberlander
 

pipisme

After the Christian Democrats voted by a majority of about 70% to 30% to continue with the Social Democrats, 31 Christian Democrat deputies joined the Conservative People's Party. That meant that the Conservatives now had 213 seats and the Christian Democrats 108 seats. Therefore the Social Democrats [217 seats] plus the Christian Democrats was 325 seats which was eighteen seats short of an overall majority. So the Chancellor, Julius Leber, invited the Liberal Party to join the coalition, which they did. The three party coalition had 378 seats in the Reichstag. Leber continued in office as Chancellor, Gerstenmaier as Vice Chancellor, and the Liberal leader, Thomas Dehler, as Foreign Minister. [1]

While most of the Conservative People's Party was opposed to the German Social National Workers Party [DSNAP], there was a minority which was sympathetic towards it and would join if it became a major party.

[1] Here is the Wikipedia entry for Dehler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dehler.
 
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pipisme

The leader of the DSNAP was Gerhard Krueger [born 6 December 1908]. He had been leader of Nazi student groups at Universities of Leipzig and Greifswold, and in 1933 became head of the German Students Union.

Ursula Coetze [born 30 May 1909] was a Social Democrat minister in the new German government. [1] Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was ambassador of the German Federation to the United Kingdom.

[1] Here is her entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Goetze.
 
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