The history of the German Centre Party (German: Deutsche Zentrumspartei) begins in 1870, when Catholic members of the Prussian House of Representatives formed a faction. The Centre Party developed into a people's party for Catholics throughout Germany. It had significant influence on politics in both the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. It also provided the Reich Chancellor on four occasions. In 1933, at the beginning of the Nazi era, the party dissolved after voting for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler the necessary two-thirds majority and thus contributed significantly to his rise.
The party was re-founded in 1945. However, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) formed alongside it as a broad collection of liberal, Christian-democratic, and conservative to nationalist politicians. Many former Centre members, such as Konrad Adenauer, joined the CDU. The new Centre could no longer match the election results of the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, it was represented in the Bundestag from 1949 to 1957, though not in the federal government.
The Centre participated in several state governments. It last provided deputies in the Landtag of Lower Saxony until 1959. The party's strongholds were in that federal state and in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Bavaria, the Bavarian People's Party had already separated from the Centre in 1920. After 1945, the Centre worked with the Bavaria Party, which existed alongside the much larger Christian Social Union in Bavaria.
The modern Centre Party became a minor party during the 1950s. It participated unsuccessfully in several federal elections. Mergers with like-minded parties failed, while Christian fundamentalist groups such as the Christliche Mitte split off from it. Through the defection of the former AfD federal chairman Jörg Meuthen in June 2022, the Centre Party was briefly represented with one seat in the European Parliament.
Age and name Catholic parties or factions existed in the parliaments of individual German states before 1870. For a long time, a political party was not understood as a membership organization with an elaborate program, but rather as an association of deputies and like-minded individuals. Modern parties only developed from the 1860s onwards, when universal suffrage (for men) and state conditions required a stable, permanent organization.
The name "Centre" comes from the fact that Catholics sat in parliament between the Liberals on the left and the Conservatives on the right. There were already Catholic factions with this name before 1870. Today, however, a "centrist" party is generally thought of as the political centre, without necessarily implying a denominational orientation.
The modern minor party calls itself the "oldest party in Germany" that still exists. The current party is a re-founding from 1945. The party of 1870 was initially not a party in today's sense and had also dissolved in 1933. Unlike the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), for example, there was no executive committee in exile during the Nazi era. In contrast to other parties, however, the modern Centre uses the old name from 1870. The SPD can trace its organizational roots back to the General German Workers' Association of 1863, but has only borne its current name since 1891. The German Progress Party of 1861 is considered the first German party, in whose tradition the FDP stands.
Prehistory and Empire
Political Catholicism in Germany The politicization of the Catholic denomination took a long time and was not linear. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 marked the end of the ecclesiastical principalities and led, like the French Revolution in general, to a reorientation of German Catholics. They understood their religion as a structural element for society. German Romanticism and its retrospective view of the Middle Ages contributed to this.
The politicization of this development was decisively determined by several factors. One was the replacement of theology by the Ultramontane movement (strict alignment of the Catholic Church with Rome, up to the dogma of Papal infallibility). This development met with considerable mistrust from both neo-absolutist German princes and religiously critical Liberals. The conflict reached a first peak during the "mixed marriage dispute" of the 1830s. During this, the Archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, was arrested in 1837. These so-called "" triggered a wave of protest and solidarity in Catholic Germany previously unknown.
In the medium term, the opposition of Catholic Germany to the authoritarian state and liberalism found its political expression. Already in the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848, the was formed in the Paulskirche, representing a loose association of Catholic deputies. It was a kind of cross-factional association focused only on defending the rights of the church against the state. In 1852, a was formed in the Prussian Landtag, which dissolved again in 1867: in the constitutional conflict of that time, conservative and liberal deputies dominated. Catholic factions or faction-like associations were also founded in the parliaments of the other German states. An example is the of 1869.
The "Soest Conferences", a loose discussion circle around the brothers Georg and Hermann von Mallinckrodt as well as , , Baron , Friedrich Wilhelm Weber, and , played an important role in the phase that was to lead to the founding of the Centre Party. The first meeting took place on 12 January 1864 in Soest, and further meetings followed at irregular intervals until the Austro-Prussian War broke out in 1866.
The victory of Protestant Prussia and the pushing out of the Austrian protective power of Catholics in the Reich meant a setback for political Catholicism in Germany. Nevertheless, this was no longer merely a concern of a small, educated upper class. Not least thanks to massive support from local clergy, it began to become increasingly attractive to Catholic voters. For the Catholic Sauerland, for instance, authorities reported an advance of the Catholic movement in the 1860s.
1870 founding
Only in 1869, the year before new elections to the Prussian House of Representatives, was the founding of a party prepared again. Assemblies in Ahlen, Münster, and Essen adopted a program drafted primarily by Hermann von Mallinckrodt and Peter Reichensperger. It demanded the independence of church institutions. and church school supervision were to be preserved. The foundation of a German federal state was to take place on a federal basis, granting the member states relatively large independence.
The Essen Program (30 June 1870) already rudimentarily demanded a social policy: the state should work to eliminate social grievances. The tax burden should be distributed more fairly, and the military budget should not be increased.
The of 28 October 1870 finally achieved the greatest importance among the early program documents, as the leading forces of the founding were elected to the Prussian House of Representatives on its basis. On 13 December 1870, 48 members of the Prussian House of Representatives founded the "Faction of the Centre", whose first chairman was Karl Friedrich von Savigny. Additionally, Peter Reichensperger and August Reichensperger, Hermann von Mallinckrodt, Ludwig Windthorst, Friedrich Wilhelm Weber, and Philipp Ernst Maria Lieber were influential, as was Eduard Müller from Berlin.
Opposition and Kulturkampf (1870–1880)
In the 1871 election to the first German Reichstag, the party won 18.6 percent of the vote and 63 mandates. This made it the second-strongest faction after the National Liberal Party. Many liberal deputies lost their seats and suspected illicit support of the Centre by the clergy.
The Centre took on an opposition role in the new Reich from the beginning. It saw itself as representing a denominational minority, after Austria would permanently not belong to the German federal state. Representatives of ethnic minorities in the Reichstag were often Catholic (such as many Poles and Alsatians). Some joined the Centre faction. The social policy of the Centre Party stood in contrast to the economic policy of the Liberals, which Reich Chancellor Bismarck had also joined at the time.
Culturally, a conflict arose with the Liberals and the modern state due to the stance of the Church. The Syllabus of Errors, in which the Pope condemned liberalism among other things, contributed to this. At the First Vatican Council, papal infallibility was proclaimed. The Liberals, but also Bismarck, feared an attack on state sovereignty.
Already at the founding of the Confederation and the Reich, Bismarck had worked not only with parts of the Conservatives but also with the Liberals. Now they endeavored together to push back the influence of the Papacy and the Catholic Church in Germany. The accusation of Ultramontanism (being guided by a power beyond the Alps) was also applied to the Centre Party. While the Conservatives primarily fought foreign influence, the Liberals saw the Papacy as a haven of reaction.
Thus arose the Kulturkampf in the Reich and in Prussia: Civil marriage was introduced, so that citizens were no longer dependent on a religious community and its rules for marriage. It also involved the school system and the question of whether clergy were allowed to give political speeches during worship (the Pulpit Law). Some resistant clergy were imprisoned. The result was not the intended weakening of the Centre, but a closer union of Catholics. The Centre, reviled by Bismarck as Reichsfeinde (enemies of the Reich), profiled itself in the opposition role.
In the 1874 Reichstag election, at the height of the Kulturkampf, the Centre was able to expand its share of the vote to 28 percent. Although this share declined in the following decades, the Centre always won between 90 and 106 mandates in the Reichstag until the end of the Empire. in the coming decades, many Catholics voted for the Centre regardless of whether they belonged to poorer or wealthier classes. From 1881 to 1912, the Centre Party provided the largest Reichstag faction until it was replaced by the SPD.
Pillar of Government (1880–1914)
Cooperation between Bismarck and the National Liberals ended around 1878. He now relied more heavily on the Conservatives and sought new allies. Economically, he swiveled from liberalism to protectionism. To ward off the demands of Social Democracy, but also of the Centre, Bismarck began a social policy.
The Centre slowly approached Bismarck's imperial administration, partly because a total of five mitigation and peace laws to settle the Kulturkampf were passed from 1880 to 1887. Meanwhile, Bismarck fought Social Democracy through the Anti-Socialist Laws.
Since the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 and the death of party chairman Ludwig Windthorst in 1891, the denominationally Catholic aspect of the party receded under party chairman Ernst Lieber in favor of even stronger socio-political engagement. In particular, through the People's Association for Catholic Germany, founded in 1890 and boasting a large membership, an organization emerged that contributed significantly through countless educational lectures and brochures, as well as the socio-political work of the People's Association offices, to giving the Centre Party a definitively socio-political profile and binding many workers to it.
Under Bismarck's successors, the Centre supported government policy in the important fields of domestic, foreign, colonial, and naval policy, thus completing the transformation from an opposition to a de facto governing party, although Catholics continued to be second-class citizens in many respects, denied access to higher positions unless they publicly spoke out against the Centre.