Page 119 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

92 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

well how to communicate the economic challenges at that time and the
necessary provisional measures to both the party at grass-roots level and
the general public, benefited from the fact that in the second half of 1947
economic liberalism was increasingly standing up to the socialist Zeitgeist of
the immediate post-war period; numerous publications in both the media
and academia document the intensity and the extent of this controversy
and trend. Due to his economic views and the competence to
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communicate those, the nomination of Hanns Seidel as successor of
Johannes Semler, who had been dismissed as Director of the
Administration for Economics due to his critical utterances concerning
the American food supply by the military authorities on 24 January, was
discussed at the fourth party convention of the CSU in Marktredwitz the
following day as well as in the caucus on 23 February 1948. However,
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Seidel rejected a candidacy the very next day. After the CDU/CSU
parliamentary group could not agree upon another nominee at this stage,
for the time being the then State Secretary in the bizonal Administration
for Economics, Walter Strauß, presided over the directorate. Finally, after
heated negotiations with the FDP and the CSU which both supported the
candidacy of Ludwig Erhard, the Christian Democrats abstained from
approving the nomination of Hans-Christoph Seebohm (DP) for the sake
of the political cooperation. As the SPD also did not nominate its own
candidate, the bourgeois coalition of CDU/CSU, FDP and DP came to a
mutual agreement and elected Erhard as Director of the Administration
for Economics in the subsequent plenary meeting of the Economic
Council on 2 March 1948.
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The Union’s decision to approve the nomination of the then relatively
unknown Ludwig Erhard for this decisive post was arguably more
influenced by party political considerations rather than by the preference
for a particular regulatory policy. The parliamentary group had
unanimously and repeatedly committed itself to the Ahlener Programm and
did initially not intend to move from its part-liberal part-interventionist
economic policy to Erhard’s consequent liberalisation of the economy.
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However, due to some doubts about the effectiveness of government
control of the economy, the lack of alternatives, the need to coalesce
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with the Liberal Democrats, which strengthened the liberal economic
forces within the parliamentary group leading to the nomination of the
managing director Alex Haffner (CDU) to head the committee on
industry and trade within the Administration for Economics, and not
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least by the virtue of the persuasiveness of the former advertising manager
Ludwig Erhard, the parliamentary group of the CDU/CSU finally
supported Erhard’s enterprise to liberalise the economy. After
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delivering his convincing economic policy statement at the fourteenth