Talk:National Front of the German Democratic Republic

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BetacommandBot (talk) 23:04, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

How did it work

The article doesnt explain some things very well. Did a party (or candidate) have to be part of the National Front in order to contest an election ? If not what were the benefits of being part of it and what were the consequences of not being so ? How exactly did the SED "control" the National Front (particularly given that they only had around 25% support). How were other parties "forced" to be part of the National Front ? How much policy was set by the NF and how much autononmy did individual parties have ? What happened if one or more constituent parties adopted a policy which ran counter to the NF line ? Was there much point for a GDR citizen discontented with the SED voting for another party and if not why ? 213.40.123.62 (talk) 12:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

The National Front was responsible for the East German electoral process from the nomination of candidates to counting the ballot boxes. I don't think independent candidates ever stood in opposition to the Front, but if so I'd imagine it was a very rare occurrence and probably warranted some eyes from the Stasi. The Front was also a means to promote the idea of liberals, Christians, and others working in a "patriotic" fashion with the SED to build a better Germany. If an East German citizen disliked the atheist and Communist stance of the SED, for example, he could join the CDU instead.

The entire system is based on the "People's Democracies" concept introduced in the 1940's, which promoted the idea of a state ruled by the working-class supported by peasants, small businessmen and sections of the bourgeoisie in struggle against fascism and united in the rebuilding of the country. Naturally, since the non-Communist Parties didn't like the idea of Communist dominance, there were power struggles which inevitably ended with the Communist Party coming out on top. Plenty of other countries had multi-party Front governments, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria. I actually have a book on East German politics written in the 1970's (in West Germany) which covers the Front, and I may update this article at a later date to incorporate segments from the book. --Ismail (talk) 06:35, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

I've expanded the article a bit. --Ismail (talk) 12:03, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

So the SED (itself born out of a forced merger of the Communist Party with the larger Social Democratic party where Communists held all the key positions) despite enjoying (at most) 25% support was able to hold a totally dominant position in a enforced grand coalition with half a dozen non-Socialist parties whose political impotence was further ensured by bring in some (largely SED affiliated) trade unions and an (SED affiliated) youth organization seemingly to make up the numbers ? So what exactly was the point for the non SED parties (or even the moderate wing of the SPD) participating in the a charade whose entire basis was to uphold a pretense of democracy (which doesn't seem to have fooled anyone) while effectively excluding any non-communist from any meaningful decision making ? Surely it would have been withdrawing completely from political life, going underground or (where possible) leaving the country were all preferable options than to dignify such a sham ? What (if anything) did non-communist individuals or parties achieve by working within such a system ? 2.127.211.40 (talk) 14:15, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

The multi-party system allowed non-communists to participate in the country's political life as junior partners of the SED, and they could bring up grievances from parts of the population they represented (e.g. priests and believers would ask the CDU to intercede on their behalf when the SED was drafting legislation that was seen as impacting religious matters, and possibly a compromise could be worked out between the SED and CDU.) --Ismail (talk) 23:49, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

The theory used to justify the national front was based on the notion (held by many postwar German communists) that it was the pre-Nazi era German political parties (particularly the social-democratic SPD) who were were largely to blame for the rise of the NDASP (Nazi) party by failing to respond positively to calls by the pre-war KPD (Communist party) to establish a "united anti-fascist front" which could have prevented the Nazi's achieving power by virtue of the fact that the latter never commanded an outright electoral majority. By establishing such a front (lead of course by Communists) in the GDR it could be assured that Nazism could never re-emerge there. However this ignored the fact that in the early 1930's there were many Communists who were (in hindsight over) complacent about of the rise of fascism believing that such a regime would quickly collapse leaving the communists in a prime position to take over the reins of power. 86.148.147.5 (talk) 12:10, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

"liberal market democratic forms"

Beyond My Ken (talk · contribs) could you please elaborate as to what "better before" means, and elaborate to how it is better to say the DDR had a "guise" up that they were liberally democratic or had a liberal market, please? AxderWraith Crimson (talk) 12:16, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Yeah the National Front didn't claim to be operating in accordance with "liberal market democratic forms." The SED and the other parties explicitly repudiated such forms. For instance, Manfred Gerlach of the Liberal Democratic Party stated, "The GDR is the joint product of all citizens, of all classes and strata allied with the working class. . . thanks to the leadership of our people by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany" and that "our opponents would prefer, under socialism, parties bitterly struggling against each other in the name of 'pluralism,' rather than the steadily growing political-moral unity of the people. Only too happily would they exchange the leadership role of the party of the working class for a bourgeois-style oppositional wrangling. May these remain but empty wishes!" (quoted in East Germany: A New German Nation Under Socialism?, 1984, p. 198, 201) --Ismail (talk) 20:38, 11 March 2021 (UTC)