Weimar Coalition

The Weimar Coalition (German: Weimarer Koalition) is the name given to the coalition government formed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the German Democratic Party (DDP) and the Catholic Centre Party (Z), who together had a large majority of the delegates to the Constituent Assembly that met at Weimar in 1919, and were the principal groups that designed the constitution of the Weimar Republic. These three parties were seen as the most committed to Germany's new democratic system, and together governed Germany until the elections of 1920, when the first elections under the new constitution were held, and both the SPD and especially the DDP lost a considerable share of their votes. Although the Coalition was revived in the ministry of Joseph Wirth from 1921 to 1922, the pro-democratic elements never truly had a majority in the Reichstag from this point on, and the situation gradually grew worse for them with the continued weakening of the DDP. This meant that any pro-republican group that hoped to attain a majority would need to form a "Grand Coalition" with the conservative-liberal German People's Party (DVP), which only gradually moved from monarchism to republicanism over the course of the Weimar Republic and was virtually wiped out politically after the death of their most prominent figure, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929.

Nevertheless, the coalition remained at least theoretically important as the parties most supportive of republican government in Germany, and continued to act in coalition in the government of the Free State of Prussia (by far Germany's largest constituent state both by population and by area) and other states until as late as 1932. In the second round of voting in the 1925 presidential election, the Weimar Coalition parties all supported the candidacy of the Centrist former chancellor Wilhelm Marx, who was narrowly defeated by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, supported by a centre-right coalition of the DVP, the German National People's Party (DNVP), and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP). The fact that the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) decided to run their candidate Ernst Thälmann in the second round was widely seen as a spoiler candidate who in effect threw the election to Hindenburg. Both the Comintern and East German historiography later criticized this action by the KPD-leadership as a mistake.

After World War II the reconstituted SPD and the de facto successor of the Centre Party (the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) (within Bavaria the BVP was de facto succeeded by the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) which together formed the centre-right Union) and the DD' and DVP's joint de facto successor (Free Democratic Party) formed the main political basis of the democratic Bundestag of West Germany.