Vol. 20 · No. 4 · Issue 65 · Winter 2002

Daniel Hough
School of Politics, University of Nottingham, UK

Download full article (142 KB) [subscribers only]

Abstract

In the years since unification, Germany's political parties have faced a number of formidable challenges. They range from incorporating the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal Republic's political processes, reassessing Germany's role in the wider world, overcoming gridlock on many pressing policy questions at home (perhaps best understood as the overcoming of the Reformstau), to finding a way out of Germany's much maligned economic malaise. Such challenges have had a not inconsiderable effect on the German party system, the end product of which has been that this system, once a bastion of cast-iron stability, has become characterized by diversity and genuine electoral competition in a way that it has not been since the late 1950s. Therefore, the electoral position of the much-vaunted Volksparteien, if perhaps not their control of the political process, has slipped considerably.