SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF GERMANY

German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) German political party that calls for government control or regulation of large industry; it is Germany's oldest and largest single party. The SPD was formed by the merger of the General German Workers' Union of Ferdinand Lassalle and the Social Democratic Workers' Party of the Marxists August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The merger took place in Gotha in 1875 and resulted in the Socialist Workers' Party, which after 1890 was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Though banned in 1878 by the Prussian government of Otto von Bismarck, the party flourished, even helping to found the Second International in 1889. When legalized in 1890, it received 19.7 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections; this grew to 34.8 percent of the vote and 110 of the 397 Reichstag seats in 1912. But its vote for war credits in 1914 and the disaster of World War I led the party to split, the centrists under Karl Kautsky forming the Independent Social Democratic Party and the left under Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht forming the Spartacus League, which in December 1918 became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The right wing of the SPD under Friedrich Ebert joined with liberals and conservatives to crush the Soviet-style uprisings in Germany in 191820. In the 1919 elections the SPD received 37.9 percent of the vote (while the Independent Social Democrats received another 7.6 percent), but the party's failure to win favourable terms from the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (terms embodied in the Treaty of Versailles) and the nation's severe economic problems led to a drop in support. Even after reuniting with the Independents, the Social Democrats in 1924 secured only 20.5 percent of the vote. Though the party recovered some ground, the Great Depression caused them to lose it again to the Nazis on the right and the Communists on the left. By 1933 it held only 120 of 647 seats in the Reichstag to the Nazis' 288 and the Communists' 81. Outlawed by the Nazis in 1933, the SPD revived after World War II. In West Germany its vote steadily rose from 1953 (28.8 percent) to 1972 (45.9 percent). The SPD joined a coalition government with the Christian Democrats in 1966 and then in 1969 became senior partners in a coalition government with the Free Democrats. This coalition governed until 1982, when the Free Democrats broke away and formed a new government with the Christian Democrats. In East Germany after World War II, the SPD was forcibly merged with the Soviet-dominated Communist Party of Germany to form the communist-led Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Soon after the anticommunist revolution of 1989, an independent SPD reemerged, holding its first party conference at Leipzig in February 1990. It developed close ties with the West German SPD and merged with it later that year, as East and West Germany were reunited.