Bundestag elections since 1949: 1990: a yellow swab on the map

Two colors dominated the graphical representation of election results in Germany for many years.

This is particularly the case when it was made clear which party in a constituency had won the direct mandate.

Only recently have new colors been added because the Left Party, the Greens and the AfD have taken direct seats in federal elections.

In the first all-German federal election in 1990, the political electoral geography showed a lot of the “old” Federal Republic - with one significant exception.

Peter Sturm

Editor in politics, responsible for "Political Books".

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Out of all the blue (at that time for the Union parties) and red (for the SPD) a lonely yellow spot shone out.

For the first time since 1957, the FDP had again received the most first votes in one constituency.

It owed this not to agreements with friendly parties, but to its own political strength.

However, this force listened to the name of a single politician: Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

German election story (s): Every day until September 26th we tell about an earlier federal election.

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The constituency of Halle, in which qualified engineer Uwe Lühr stood as a direct candidate for the Liberals, was Genscher's home.

The Foreign Minister, who had been in office for 16 years at the time of the unification of Germany, came to this city in Saxony-Anhalt at the age of six in 1933 with his parents.

In 1952 the lawyer fled to the West because he no longer saw a future for himself in the GDR.

Genscher's speech was freshly remembered

At the time of the election on December 2, 1990, Genscher's most famous appearance was still freshly remembered. On September 30, 1989, from the balcony of the West German embassy in Prague, he informed the GDR refugees gathered on the embassy grounds that they were allowed to leave for the Federal Republic. Despite various foreign policy obligations, the foreign minister tried to get a presence in his old homeland. The electorate in Halle thanked the FDP candidate with 40,297 first votes. The CDU received only 27,150, the SPD 23,944 first votes.

In all of Germany, too, the Liberals did very well for their standards. The FDP was the third strongest force with eleven percent (79 seats). The CDU and CSU were ahead with 43.8 percent, which earned them 319 seats. The Social Democrats got 33.5 percent (239 seats), which was considered a somewhat disastrous result at the time. The PDS with 2.4 percent and the civil rights movement Bündnis 90 with 1.2 percent benefited from a unique feature of the 1990 election.

The two parties only achieved their 17 (PDS) and eight (Bündnis 90) seats because, according to a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, the electoral area had been divided into West and East. If a party received more than five percent of the second vote in one of the two electoral areas, it took part in the distribution of seats for the Bundestag, even if it remained below five percent in Germany as a whole. Alliance 90 came to six percent in the electoral area East, the SED successor party PDS even to eleven percent.

From the outset, there could be no doubt about the dominant theme of the election campaign.

But the tongues of the election campaigners were very different.

Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who barely escaped an internal party revolt the year before, basked in the splendor of the unexpected and surprisingly quick unification of Germany.

The “Chancellor of Unity” spread confidence.

It is true that his famous word about the “blooming landscapes” that could emerge in East Germany should fall on his feet just a few years later.

The SPD wanted to delay reunification

But in any case he hit the mood of 1990 much better than his opponent Oskar Lafontaine. The Saarland Prime Minister, staying true to his convictions, was emphatically anti-national. He spoke of the immense financial risks inherent in the unit. And while Kohl, seconded by the FDP, conjured a bright future, Lafontaine spoke of inevitably imminent tax increases.

Of course, if you look for exuberant enthusiasm in the election numbers, you will find it difficult to find what you are looking for. Participation in the election - after all the first free one in Germany since 1932 - was a modest 77.8 percent. In retrospect, this is explained by the fact that almost two months after the accession of the East German federal states to the Basic Law, the people in East and West were already showing the first signs of fatigue.

In addition, the domestic political debates in the course of 1990 were by no means as unproblematic as they sometimes appear today. SPD chancellor candidate Lafontaine even threatened to withdraw if his party did not reject the unification treaty. And the SPD chairman, Hans-Jochen Vogel, also wanted to use his party's victory in the state elections in Lower Saxony in May and the associated change in the majority structure in the Federal Council to slow down the implementation of the unification.

The fact that there were (still) other tendencies among the Social Democrats was made clear by a remark made by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to a Dutch newspaper. Schmidt, who once failed on the left in his own party, predicted defeat for the SPD in November and garnished this prognosis with the pointed remark that Lafontaine deserved it. The SPD licked its wounds after the election, for others, namely the FDP, the political sky was full of violins for a historic moment.