Page 126 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC/ SOCIAL UNION 99

women. By evoking an antimaterialist, social and humanist West German
society achieved through economic reconstruction, the CDU/CSU
attempted to attract these specific groups which the party leadership
sensed to be crucial for electoral success simply because of their
proportions in society at that time – whereas newly-arrived refugees made
up nearly 40 per cent of the population in some Länder such as Bavaria,
Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, 55 per cent of all eligible voters in
post-war West Germany were women.
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As Ludwig Erhard’s programme of a Social Market Economy together
with his personal powers of mass advocacy brought the CDU/CSU great
political credit, over time there was not only a fundamental change within
the party’s economic thinking but also – often overlooked – a shift in
principal actor, namely from Adenauer to Erhard. After defending his
concept of the Social Market Economy during the second party
convention of the CDU in the British zone of occupation in
Recklinghausen on 28/29 August 1948, Ludwig Erhard gradually became
the dominant figure in the debate on economic policy. In fact, the party
chairman, Konrad Adenauer, seldom participated in the meetings of the
CDU/CSU caucuses in the Economic Council and left the economic field
mainly wide open to his Director of the Administration for Economics in
the Economic Council. In the light of their increased public prominence,
on federal polling day in the entire Trizone on 14 August 1949 the
electorate was called to cast a vote not only between a controlled economy
and a Social Market Economy but also between Kurt Schumacher and
Ludwig Erhard.
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While Erhard, who considered it necessary to directly address the
German people in these years of economic uncertainty, unremittingly
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popularised his economic concept and gradually prepared and
implemented the liberalisation of the economy in the Economic Council,
Adenauer rather aimed to exert influence on the reorganisation of the
German post-war economy via the Parliamentary Council. Since
September 1948, Konrad Adenauer presided over this constituent panel of
65 delegates elected by the eleven Länder parliaments in the three western
zones of occupation to formulate the Basic Law, which became the
provisional Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany promulgated
on 23 May 1949. Although the wording of the Basic Law neither
mentioned expressis verbis the Social Market Economy nor defined another
particular economic system, however, some of the central terms within the
framework of basic rights, such as the right to the free development of
one’s personality or the rights of ownership and inheritance, suggested or
even predetermined a liberal economic policy. Indeed, the socialisation
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of private property for the collective good remained possible mainly due