Introduction

All countries explored in this book face similar challenges due to globalization processes. Different reactions to these developments are the result of several contextual factors as well as of the strategies of political parties. But Germany has to deal with one additional major challenge that sets this country somewhat apart from the others: the ongoing struggle to complete reunification. Despite or maybe because of the astonishing and unexpectedly rapid development that ended with political reunification on 3 October 1990, the social and economic differences between the western and the eastern part of the country have remained a major problem. The East Germans have had to adapt themselves not only to liberal democracy and the market but also to an economy that became increasingly globalized in the 1990s.

For the traditional parties, reunification and the integration of a 15 million strong post-communist electorate was a ‘unique challenge’ (Jeffery 1999: 112). But the election of 1990, the first in the reunited Germany, resulted in a triumph for West Germany's core parties, proving their organizational strength (Betz 1999: 32). As a consequence of the ‘electoral colonization’ (Jeffery 1999: 97) of the Eastern Länder (states), the party system of the reunified Germany is in general the party system of the old Federal Republic (Pappi 1994: 221). Therefore, after some early forecasts of a return to Weimar conditions, with extreme ideological polarization and a high degree of fragmentation, at least since the mid-1990s the development of German party politics has been interpreted as undramatic (Niedermayer 1998; Mielke 2001; Stöss 2000).