The 2020 Syrian legislative election was a controlled exercise by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, which had governed Syria for 60 years. However, it provided an insight into the state of the regime and the country after nine years of civil war.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the History of Elections podcast, delayed somewhat by exciting life events: I got married!

This week, to steal a joke from one of former my university lecturers, we will step into the Ba’ath and return close to the present day by exploring the 2020 parliamentary election in Syria. The second last legislative election to be held in Syria under the 55-year rule of the Assad family, this election provided a façade of stability for a regime that, as would soon become clear, was continuing to crumble.

July, 2020. Most of the world lived under public health restrictions imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which in this month reached 15 million confirmed cases; a constitutional amendment was passed in Russia that would allow President Vladimir Putin to run for two further six-year terms; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the Hagia Sophia to be reverted from a museum to be a mosque; former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was found guilty of abuse of power and corruption and sentenced to 12 years in prison; NASA launched the Mars 2020 mission containing the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, which would land on the red planet seven months later; elections were held in Croatia, Poland and Singapore; and, in Syria, some voters prepared to go to the polls to cast ballots that theoretically determined their next parliament.

Background: Ba’athism

Syria had been governed by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party since 1963, when it came to power in a bloodless coup that overthrew the partially democratic but unstable system of civilian rule that had emerged, with several interruptions, after independence from France in 1946. The Ba’ath Party assumed totalitarian control of the Syrian state, purging its political opponents and cracking down on civil society. In 1966, a second coup was orchestrated by a different faction in the Ba’ath Party, while a third coup in 1970 brought Defence Minister Hafez al-Assad to power as the country’s third Ba’athist ruler. Assad brought an end to the instability that had characterised Syrian politics since independence in 1946 and would rule as Syria’s president until his death 30 years later, establishing a cult of personality around himself and his family.

Ba’athism is a complex and variable political ideology. Meaning ‘renaissance’ or ‘resurrection,’ Ba’athism is a revolutionary socialist, Arab nationalist and pan-Arab ideology that emerged in the 1940s. Ba’ath parties were founded across the Arab world, with branches established in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Jordan, and its ideas influenced many pan-Arab leaders, including Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The movement’s slogan was “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, and it called for a united Arab socialist state free from external imperialist control. The movement was particularly successful in Syria, achieving some success in elections held during the 1950s.

Many different variants of Ba’athism emerged in this period—the party was prone to factionalism and different interpretations became predominant in different states. The first Ba’athist Government was briefly formed in 1963 as a result of a coup in Iraq—a development that inspired the Ba’athist coup plotters in Syria, who orchestrated their coup a month later.

The 1966 coup in Syria brought to power a faction known as the neo-Ba’athists, a group that focused more overtly on Marxist ideas and pursued stronger relations with the Soviet Union. The neo-Ba’athists had also become disillusioned with pan-Arabism, as embodied by Nasser, and even forced some of the original founding thinkers of the Ba’athist movement into exile. Indeed, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, one of the first Ba’athist leaders of Syria, later said that “I no longer recognise my party”. This, among other things, led to tensions with Iraq, where a more enduring Ba’athist government was established in 1968, which has been described as a more right-wing from of Ba’athism. However, in practice, Assad proved to be more pragmatic than his predecessors, for example by allowing a greater degree of private enterprise from the 1970s onwards.

The Ba’athist regime represented a very different social background than Syria’s past Governments, particularly under Assad. Its leading political and military figures, including Assad himself, were from rural and peasant backgrounds, while the former urban elite, including the Ba’ath Party’s founders, was sidelined. Alawites, an ethnoreligious offshoot of Shia Islam concentrated in the coastal north-west of Syria who comprised 10% of the country’s population and who had historically been sidelined from positions of power, were also prominent within the regime, often at the expense of other social groups.

The neo-Ba’athists emphasised a central role for the armed forces and ruled Syria as a military dictatorship. Indeed, by the 1980s, Syria spent over 20% of its GDP on the military, justified by the aim of countering Israel’s military strength—by this point, Syria had fought and lost three wars against Israel, and part of the country—the Golan Heights—was under Israeli occupation. The Ba’athist movement was also fervently secular. The first Ba’athist Governments viewed Islam as a reactionary force that was contradictory to socialist revolution. This stance was toned down by Assad from the 1970s who, although maintaining the general secular ideological stance of the movement, sought to co-opt clerics and religious figures to weaken the emerging Islamist opposition movement.

The consolidating Assad regime was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that grew increasingly militant throughout the 1970s. Its opposition particularly developed in response to Assad’s decisions to intervene against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon’s civil war and to back Iran against fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980. The Islamist opposition was also against the regime’s secularist and Alawite character and it gained particular support in urban areas, notably Aleppo, Homs and Hama. A guerilla war emerged in the late 1970 and senior Government and Ba’ath officials, particularly Alawites, were targeted in attacks and assassination attempts.

Foreshadowing events 40 years later, the regime responded by implementing sieges against opposition-controlled areas. The uprising culminated in 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood seized control of large parts of Hama. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown by indiscriminately bombarding rebel-held areas with artillery and tank fire, which is estimated to have killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people and left much of the city in ruins.

Shortly afterwards, Assad also, thanks to key support within the military, survived a coup attempt by his younger brother, Rifaat al Assad, who had led the military campaign in Hama. These events further underscored the instability of the regime and the fact that Assad’s power rested solely on the loyalty of the army, rather than stemming from popular support or institutional legitimacy.

Political System

The Ba’ath regime initially governed under a state of emergency with a provisional constitution that replaced Syria’s 1930 constitution. Assad maintained the state of emergency throughout his rule but a new permanent constitution was adopted in 1973. The constitution declared the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party as the “leading party in the society and the state”. Syria was not strictly a one-party state, as allied satellite parties within the National Progressive Front coalition, which Assad set up in 1972, were permitted to continue operating in subordination to the Ba’ath Party.

In line with its socialist orientation, the National Progressive Front coalition operated under the popular front or national front model that was prevalent in Eastern European socialist states during the Cold War and is used to this day in China and North Korea. In this model, a dominant party—the Ba’ath Party, in Syria’s case—leads a group of satellite parties with some degree of ideological variation. These parties would represent different interest groups and provide the regime with a broader social base, creating the illusion of political pluralism and co-opting additional political constituencies into the regime.

The Ba’athist state in Syria was a presidential system. However, it maintained a Parliament called the People’s Assembly that was elected in conditions that were designed to ensure the Ba’ath Party’s supremacy. The Parliament in turn nominated a candidate for President, who was to be confirmed in a national referendum. Assad “won” five such votes during his rule, the official figures never showing him falling below 99.2% support.

The question of why authoritarian states, particularly in the twentieth century, felt the need to hold such obviously rigged elections is an interesting one, and I may dedicate a full episode to it at some point. As in other such systems, elections and referenda provided the theoretical base of legitimacy for the Ba’ath Party’s rule—this was not, ideologically speaking, a monarchy, as much as it may have acted like one. Elections also served other purposes, including demonstrating the regime’s political power, demoralising the opposition, gathering political information and, sometimes, providing a very controlled opportunity for areas of discontent to be identified so that the regime could act in response.

Assad ruled Syra through military strength, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, violent crackdowns on political opponents, an expansive system of military prisons and death camps, a sectarian divide-and-rule strategy and rigged elections. He maintained control of Syria until his death from a heart attack in 2000, at the age of 69. He had established a dynastic plan for succession, despite some opposition from Ba’athist officials. It was widely believed that he was anointing his eldest son, Bassel, to succeed him in the presidency. However, upon Bassel’s death in a car crash in 1994, Assad’s second son, Bashar, was recalled from his ophthalmology training in London to be prepared for the succession.

Bashar al-Assad and Civil War

So, upon Hafez’s death in 2000, Bashar duly succeeded him as the President of Syria. The parliament rushed through a constitutional amendment to reduce the minimum age for the presidency from 40 to 34—which was, coincidentally, Bashar al Assad’s age at that time. Bashar proceeded to “win” a snap referendum—in which he was again the only candidate—with 99.7% of the vote.

Bashar al-Assad initially relinquished some of the most repressive aspects of his father’s rule. He portrayed himself as a reformer and a short period known as the “Damascus Spring” saw a degree of toleration of demands for political reform, chiefly the cancellation of the state of emergency, the release of political prisoners and the right to join opposition parties. The regime even partially met some of these demands, releasing hundreds of political prisoners months after Bashar’s succession. However, the regime ultimately decided to crush the emerging reform movement, arresting many of the leading pro-reform organisers. Thus, after a brief interlude, Bashar returned Syria to the kind of repressive rule that had been orchestrated by his father for 30 years.

His rule would not prove to be a period of stability for Syria. In 2011, the Arab Spring revolutionary wave toppled authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. Syria—now the only Ba’athist state following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003—was also hit by mass protests that similarly called for greater political rights and an end to the concentration of power and wealth among a small elite.

In Syria, the protests were sparked by the regime’s response to teenagers from the southern city of Daraa writing anti-regime graffiti on a wall, which included the slogan of the Arab Spring protests in other countries, “The people want the fall of the regime,” and also, “It’s your turn, doctor.” The teenagers were detained and tortured by the secret police, triggering protests across the country.

The Assad regime responded with a combination of repression and token reforms. On one hand, the state of emergency was brought to an end after 48 years, while a new constitution was later introduced that theoretically ended the Ba’ath Party’s monopoly on power. This allowed opposition candidates to contest presidential and parliamentary elections. However, in practice, the Ba’ath Party remained utterly dominant.

Meanwhile, the protests were put down with growing levels of violence. Thousands of protesters were gunned down in the streets, arrested, tortured and executed in prisons that effectively operated as death and torture camps for dissidents; more details about atrocities carried out in these prisons, including the infamous Sednaya prison in the north of Damascus, became known upon their liberation in December 2024.

Rather than suppress the opposition movement, the Assad regime’s brutality provoked an armed uprising and mass defections from the military, triggering the Syrian Civil War. This is not the podcast to dive into the details of a war that became incredibly complex and multilayered. From an electoral standpoint, the regime continued to hold parliamentary and presidential elections as vast swathes of the country fell out of its control, despite increasingly brutal military tactics, including the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons on opposition-controlled urban areas.

Assad’s forces reached a nadir in 2015 during the height of the jihadist Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, at which point the regime only controlled about a quarter of Syria’s territory. Indeed, at times, Assad tacitly supported ISIS by releasing jihadists from prisons and focusing his offensives against more moderate rebel groups in order to promote the narrative that the only alternative to his regime was rule by terrorist groups like ISIS. External support and interventions from Iran, Russia and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, as well as the international coalition against the Islamic State, allowed Assad to regain ground.

By 2020, the regime had regained about two-thirds of Syrian territory. The only areas still outwith Assad’s control were Rojava in the northeast, controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces; territory in the north controlled by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army; territory controlled by the Free Syrian Army in the south near the American Al-Tanf base along the Jordanian border; and the Syrian Salvation Government centred in Idlib, led by the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al Sham organisation, with which the Assad Government had reached a ceasefire agreement in 2020. As it went on, the war increasingly became an alphabet soup of militias and organisations—I’ve attached a map of the military situation in 2020 in the show notes. As noted earlier, the regime also did not control the Golan Heights, which remained under Israeli occupation and annexation.

By 2020, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’athist state appeared to have survived the nine-year civil war. Syria was effectively partitioned, but the regime had majority control of the country and governed the vast majority of its remaining people; the country’s population had fallen from 23 million in 2011 to 19 million in 2017, with millions internally displaced. This victory was, as would soon become clear, a mirage. After over a decade of war, international isolation, corruption and mismanagement, in addition to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy of regime-held areas weakened to such a degree that, when a renewed rebel offensive was launched from Idlib in 2024, the regime crumbled in the space of a week, bringing a sudden and unexpected end to 61 years of Ba’athist rule.

However, the legislative elections held in 2020 appeared to confirm Assad’s victory. Whereas the previous election in 2016 had been held throughout multiple conflict zones and could not be held at all in much of the country, the 2020 election was conducted in over 70 per cent of the country’s territory. The election was also held a year ahead of the upcoming presidential election in 2021, providing an opportunity for the regime to develop its electoral infrastructure. Assad had been “elected” to a seven-year term in 2014 with just 92.2% of the vote—a very low figure by his family’s standards—after alternative candidates were allowed to run for the first time.

The 2020 Legislative Election

250 seats of the People’s Council were up for election in 2020. The election was conducted by party bloc voting in 15 multi-member constituencies. The National Progressive Front electoral list contained 10 parties, though most candidates were from the Ba’ath Party. Candidates outwith the National Progressive Front were also permitted to stand but, by exerting indirect control over candidate selections, the regime ensured that no candidates who were genuinely critical of the Government were able to contest. Unlike the 2012 parliamentary election, when a small opposition list was allowed to participate as part of the regime’s token reforms, no other organised lists contested in 2020.

1,656 candidates ultimately ran for 250 seats in the People’s Council. This was a marked drop from the 2,649 candidates in 2016, partly due to the end of Government subsidies and economic privileges for new MPs, a decision driven by the country’s economic situation.

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the election was postponed from its original scheduled date of 13 April to 20 May, and then again to 19 July. On the election day itself, voters had to wear masks and observe social distancing while queuing to vote, and would only be let into polling stations after having their temperatures checked. Voting was largely able to proceed without conflict, although a bomb was detonated in a polling station near Daraa in the south of the country.

The official turnout figure for election day was 33.2%, a sharp drop from the figure of 58% recorded in 2016, which the Government attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. According to official figures, just over 6 million of Syria’s 18.8 million registered voters cast ballots at over 7,000 polling stations across regime-held parts of the country. Many employers were encouraged to compel their employees to vote in order to boost the turnout. Even these figures may have been massaged upwards, with allegations of ballot stuffing; indeed, at least five polling stations had to conduct recounts after more ballots were cast than there were registered voters. Some estimates put the actual turnout as low as 10%.

At some polling stations, portraits of Assad hung from the walls. In areas recently recaptured from opposition forces, for example the Damascus suburb of Douma—which had been subject to a chemical weapon attack by Assad’s forces two years earlier—polling stations were positioned near rubble and buildings pockmarked with bullets.

The National Progressive Front saw its seat tally fall from 200 to 183, while the number of unaffiliated members rose from 50 to 67—although, as noted earlier, none of these members were genuine opposition figures. Even with this drop, the National Progressive Front maintained a supermajority in the People’s Council, with just under 75% of seats, and the Ba’ath Party alone was, by remarkable coincidence, one seat over the threshold for a two-thirds supermajority. These numbers did not ultimately affect the Ba’ath Party’s degree of control over the country, and they certainly were not an indication of its political support.

Party Results

However, because we like numbers here, let’s dive into the results anyway, with the caveat that this was almost entirely a planned outcome rather than genuine fluctuation in electoral support. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party dropped slightly from 172 seats to 167—not a significant decline, as the party had recorded lower numbers during earlier parts of Bashar al-Assad’s presidency. So-called independents provided another 67 MPs, up from 62. These independents included a number of businessmen and wealthy warlords, who Assad hoped would help alleviate some of his economic challenges.

The second largest party in the previous parliament, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, or the SSNP, lost more than half of its seats, falling from seven to three, due to a reduction in its number of candidates on the National Progressive Front list. A nationalist and irridentist party sometimes described as fascist, the SSNP supported an expansive Syrian state across the Levant, appealing to Syrians who viewed the territories now internationally recognised as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan as part of historical southern Syria. The party therefore did not pursue pan-Arabism. It also contests elections in Lebanon.

The SSNP has had a complex relationship with the Ba’ath Party. The Ba’ath Governments and Assad regime maintained the pre-coup ban on the SSNP upon coming to power . However, the parties came closer due to shared interests during the Lebanese Civil War, and the SSNP was officially unbanned in 2005. It then contested the 2007 election as part of the National Progressive Front and, when the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, it provided firm political and military support to Assad.

When an “opposition” list was formed for the 2012 parliamentary election, the SSNP broke from the National Progressive Front and joined the new list. It rejoined the National Progressive Front in 2014 and contested subsequent elections as part of the ruling coalition. However, ahead of the 2020 election, the regime appeared to crack down on the SSNP in an attempt to curtail the influence that it had gained during the civil war, particularly among Syria’s minorities, due to the reduced credibility of Ba’athism. The SSNP’s militia, the Eagles of the Whirlwind, which had supported the Syrian army during the war, was dismantled in 2019, though it remained active in Lebanon, and the party itself was sidelined during the 2020 election. This explains the SSNP’s reduced influence and loss of seats.

Syria’s two communist factions—the Communist Party (Unified) and Communist Party (Bakdash), named after its leaders in the Bakdash family—won 4 seats between them, unchanged from 2016. The party had split back in 1986 over differences relating to political developments in the Soviet Union, but each faction remained part of the National Progressive Front and broadly endorsed traditional Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The Socialist Unionist Party’s tally was also unchanged at two seats. The Socialist Unionist Party had split from the Ba’ath Party in 1961 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, also endorsed an Arab nationalist and socialist platform. Meanwhile, the Arab Socialist Union Party, another Arab nationalist and socialist party—you can see the ideological similarities in the names—gained an additional seat to finish with three seats. The National Covenant Party, another Arab nationalist party, also gained a seat to finish with two.

The Arab Democratic Union Party—not to be confused with the Arab Socialist Union Party—re-entered the People’s Assembly for the first time since 2012. The Arab Democratic Union Party supported—you guessed it—an Arab nationalist and socialist platform. Finally, the Democratic Socialist Unionist Party, a party that had split from the Socialist Unionist Party in 1974, also re-entered the People’s Assembly for the first time since 2012.

As that survey of Syria’s parties illustrated, the National Progressive Front did not contain a great deal of ideological diversity. The only exceptions to the Arab nationalist and socialist parties was provided by the SSNP—and its influence was being diminished—and the two communist factions. The coalition was, then, an exercise in controlled pluralism, expanding the regime’s tent beyond the Ba’ath Party, but not very far beyond it.

The number of women in the People’s Assembly was also reduced, falling from 32 in 2016 to 27, or just over 10%--the lowest figure since 2003.

There were some interesting shifts in the religious and ethnic composition of the new legislature. Sunni Muslims comprised the largest number of elected members, at 68%, reflecting their majority in the country, while Alawites were the second largest group at 17%. Additionally, 18 MPs were Christians of varying denominations and 8 were Druze. The Druze members largely replaced those in the previous People’s Assembly, with the new members seen to be regime loyalists in the context of ongoing anti-Assad unrest in Suweyda in the south, Syria’s only Druze-majority governorate. There were also six Kurdish members elected, up from three in 2016, though this representation still fell well below the Kurdish share of Syria’s population.

However, the most notable change was the inclusion of four Armenian MPs, the first time any had been elected since 1947. This has been attributed to Assad’s attempts to maintain support among Syria’s Armenian minority and also with the state of Armenia itself, due to their shared hostility to Turkey and alliance with Russia. The inclusion of greater ethnic diversity also allowed the Assad regime to continue claiming a status as the protector of Syria’s minority communities.

An analysis by the Middle East Institute identified 12% of successful candidates as senior figures in pro-regime militias, while 22% were suspected of committing crimes against humanity or war crimes. Meanwhile, 16 MPs were former generals, 13 of whom were elected for the first time. This reflected a continuing militarisation of the People’s Assembly, which had begun with the 2012 election, and provided an opportunity to provide patronage to figures within the army and militias that had helped Assad remain in power.

Aftermath

As this was not a consequential election that had the capacity to shift the balance of power in Syria, there is little to say about its aftermath. In August, President Assad dismissed the incumbent Prime Minister, Imad Khamis, and replaced him with the water minister and former road engineer, Hussein Arnous, in the context of a deteriorating economic situation. The new cabinet, unsurprisingly, was dominated by Ba’ath Party members. Arnous would serve for four years until the next legislative election in 2024. His replacement in September 2024 ensured that he narrowly avoided being in office during the regime’s collapse a few months later.

Every party that won seats in the 2020 election ended up being banned by the Syrian Provisional Government in January 2025; many Ba’ath Party offices had already been seized the previous month as Assad fled the country. It is unclear whether any of them will be reformed in some shape in the new Syria—or, indeed, what kind of political system or state will emerge from the transition: the peril of covering an election so close to the present day!

Thank you very much for listening. The next episode of the History of Elections podcast will take us further back in time as we explore the 1940 wartime referendum held in French Oceania…

Reading List

Cleveland, William L. & Bunton, Martin, A History of the Modern Middle East (Routledge: New York, 2016).

‘Syria goes to the polls as new sanctions hit war-ravaged economy,’ Reuters (19 July 2020), accessed on 18 August 2025 at: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/syria-goes-to-the-polls-as-new-sanctions-hit-war-ravaged-economy-idUSKCN24K0FS.

Shaar, Karam & Akil, Samy, ‘Inside Syria’s Clapping Chamber: Dynamics of the 2020 Parliamentary Elections,’ Middle East Institute (28 January 2021).

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In 1940, Costa Rica held elections for its president and legislature amid a transitional period in the country's history that laid the path to civil war.

Hello, and welcome to episode 3 of the History of Elections podcast. This month we will be exploring the 1940 general election in Costa Rica, held during a transformative period in the Central American country’s history that would define its political trajectory for the rest of the century.

February, 1940. The Soviet Union begins a massive attack on Finnish forces defending Karelia during the Winter War, two months after the Soviet invasion first began; in Tibet, the 4-year-old Tenzin Gyatso is proclaimed the 13th Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism; the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which would from the basis of radiocarbon dating, is discovered by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; the Soviet theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, is executed as part of Joseph Stalin’s purges; and, in Costa Rica, voters go to the polls to elect their next president and parliament.

Since gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Costa Rica has developed a reputation as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Latin America. Like many of its neighbours, Costa Rica has experienced blips in that record—notably, a series of coups d’etat in the 1860s—but, by 1870, a sequence of stable if not always democratic liberal administrations governed the country for several decades. Another coup in 1917 led to a short-lived military regime that was overthrown by a popular uprising two years later, after which constitutional government was restored.

From 1910, the dominant party in Costa Rican politics was the Republican Party. Founded in 1901, it first came to power under the presidency of Ricardo Jiménez, who served three non-consecutive terms between 1910 and 1936—immediate re-election being forbidden by the constitution, as in many other Latin American countries. Within Costa Rica’s liberal consensus, the party was founded along similarly liberal lines, though appealing to a new social base among local peasant leaders. The Republican Party oversaw the introduction of direct presidential elections in 1913—the president was previously elected via an electoral college—and expanded the franchise. It was also the party in power at the time of the 1917 coup.

Following the restoration of constitutional rule in 1919, Costa Rica experienced several competitive elections as power rotated between different parties and presidents. A secret ballot was introduced in the 1920s, although accusations of fraud and ballot stuffing remained a consistent feature of elections. In fact, it has been argued that the secret ballot actually produced more blatant acts of fraud, albeit at a lower rate, as parties resorted to more extreme measures to influence results.

In 1932, the Republican Party suffered a split, as Ricardo Jiménez—who had served his second term as president between 1924 and 1928—led a breakaway grouping named the National Republican Party, or PRN. Despite the split, the new PRN won the presidential election held that same year, electing Jimenez to a third non-consecutive term. This initiated a period of electoral dominance for the party, which elected its candidate for president in 1936, León Cortés, by a landslide.

Cortés’ presidency was marked by a series of public construction and infrastructure works, including the construction of the country’s first international airport. He also supported new banana plantations, established new ports and introduced banking reforms. Most controversial, however—particularly in subsequent decades—was Cortés affinity with Nazi Germany. At the outset of the Second World War he barred entry to Polish Jews fleeing Nazi authorities, and he even appointed Max Effinger, the German-born leader of Costa Rica’s local Nazi foreign branch, to be his director of migration.

The PRN’s popularity continued to surge during its second term in power. The 1938 midterm election for half the seats of the Constitutional Congress, the country’s legislature, saw the party rise to 62% of the vote, the highest vote share it had yet achieved in any election, and a promising portent ahead of the 1940 presidential election.

As the 1940 election approached, Cortés began exploring ways to run for a second term, despite the constitutional prohibition on doing so. However, he was eventually persuaded not to make any such attempt, and committed to standing down at the end of his term in 1940.

During Cortes’ term, the PRN began to experience another internal division. The influence of its founder, Jiménez, began to wane as he aged—he would be 80 by the time of the 1940 election. At the same time, a young doctor and congressman named Rafael Calderón began to grow in status within the party. Educated in Belgium, where he had been influenced by social Christian ideas, an ideology that fused Christian theology with the political ideals of social welfare, public ownership and egalitarianism, Calderón advocated a shift to the political left. His commitment to these ideas has also been interpreted by some historians as a pragmatic measure to replace the PRN’s declining support among the coffee oligarchs with a new support base in the labour movement.

In doing so, he sought to follow in the footsteps of several other Latin American countries, notably Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, each of which had established social security programmes by the 1930s. In contrast, such programmes were much rarer in Central America, where the ruling, typically liberal elites resisted such reform. Calderón’s political ascendancy thereby challenged the liberal consensus that had prevailed in Costa Rica since the 1870s.

Despite the political stability of the past decade, Calderón’s attitude represented growing discontent with how Costa Rica had handled the Great Depression amid an upsurge of industrial unrest in the 1930s, particularly within banana plantations. Costa Rica’s banana plantations were largely owned by the United Fruit Company, an American company whose presence in central American states directly led to the term ‘banana republic.’

This culminated in the wonderfully named ‘Great Banana Strike’ of 1934, which ended in failure for the workers but contributed to a growing political consciousness among the workers. Growing political attention began to be placed on poverty and economic inequality; communist, socialist and anarchist movements grew in popularity; and immigrant groups began making growing contributions to the labour movement.

Calderón secured the PRN’s nomination in 1940, with the reluctant endorsement of President Cortes, in exchange for a commitment—which would later fall apart—to support Cortes’ candidacy in the 1944 election.

Calderón did not end up facing substantial opposition in the 1940 election. The old Republican Party had withered away, as had the National Party, a liberal party—or, perhaps more accurately, a brand—that had contested elections in 1928 and 1936. Moreover, Calderón maintained his party’s support among the powerful coffee oligarchs. In an attempt to prevent Calderón from taking power, there was a brief bid to coax Ricardo Jiménez into a fourth presidential campaign, but he ultimately declined.

As a result, Calderón faced two opposing parties, neither of which had substantial political or financial backing. One of those parties, the Guanacastecan Brotherhood, did not even seek to represent the entire country, instead focusing on regional interests in the province of Guanacaste in the north-east of Costa Rica since its formation three years earlier. The Brotherhood nominated Virgilio Salazar as its candidate.

The other party was the Costa Rican Communist Party. Founded in 1931, the party was, as might be expected, a member of the Communist International, although it retained some independence from Soviet directives, calling instead for a ‘creole communism’ based on Costa Rican traditions and with a greater focus on rural areas . The party’s candidate was its founding leader, Manuel Mora, who had previously contested the 1936 election against Leon Cortés, winning 5% of the vote.

According to the constitution, whoever won a majority of the vote would be duly elected president. If no candidate won a majority—which, due to there being three candidates, remained a possibility—it fell to the Constitutional Congress to decide which of the two top-placed candidates would be elected. As the Congress was utterly dominated by the PRN by this point, a run-off would effectively ensure a victory for Calderón.

Voting in the election was open to all men over the age of 20, a limit that was lowered to 18 for men who were married or, to quote the constitution, “professors of some science.” Women were denied the vote, a status that would not change until 1949.

The campaign was contested over the radio airwaves and in Costa Rica’s newspapers, which often reprinted speeches delivered over radio. Newspapers also contained news of party activities and, presumably to build a sense of momentum, lists of the names of party supporters.

Calderón largely avoided discussing social welfare or reforms in the campaign, hoping that his party’s structural advantages and his personal popularity could propel him to victory without having to get dragged into divisive issues. Only on the night before the election did he publicly discuss the extent of his plans for social reform, stating that his “fundamental preoccupation” as president would be with the poor.

His assessment was entirely correct. Without facing any great unified opposition, Calderón won the election in a landslide, securing 84.5% of the popular vote. His victory for the PRN was the first time any party had won three successive terms since the 1880s. Calderón’s second closest competitor was Mora, who took 9.9% for the communist cause, nearly doubling his vote share from four years earlier. In last place was Salazar with 5.7%. Turnout was 80.9%, or just over 100,000. This was an increase on 1936, which can be attributed to the introduction of compulsory voting that year.

Calderón swept every province of Costa Rica, though performed slightly less well in Guanacaste due to Salazar’s candidacy. Calderón also very slightly underperformed in the populous central valley region in the geographic centre of the country, though his landslide was so absolute that this did not make any great difference.

There were some allegations of fraud, especially in rural areas, and the lack of any serious competition against Calderón did not suggest the kind of healthy, competitive electoral culture that had existed in Costa Rica in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Lehoucq and Molina describe the 1940s as “one of the most infamous and fraud-ridden” decades in Costa Rican political history—though this would get worse as the decade progressed. The 1940 election itself was somewhat free and fair, at least among the male electorate; even if all the accusations of fraud had been true, it would not have been enough to overturn Calderón’s victory.

Thus, Calderón was sworn into office with a genuine and sizable mandate. The PRN similarly swept the congressional election for half the seats in the Constitutional Congress, building on the party’s landslide for the other half in 1938. This provided a clear majority for Calderón’s agenda.

He put that mandate to good use. 1940 has been identified by historians as a turning point in Costa Rica’s history, when the ‘Liberal State’ that had prevailed for the past 70 years gave way to the ‘Reform State.’

After a slow start focused more on public health measures, he eventually established the Costa Rican social security fund, a public pension and healthcare system. He brought together four independent higher education schools to create the University of Costa Rica, a public university. Calderón’s government also pursued some cautious land reform, allowing people to acquire land on the condition that they cultivated it. In 1942, he implemented the “social guarantees,” which gave workers the right to form unions and strike and introduced a minimum wage. These rights were enshrined in the constitution in 1943.

With these policies, Mark Rosenberg described Calderón as a leader “who reoriented the state as an instrument of the working and middle groups.” Many of these policies were modelled on the welfare state that had been established in Chile, illustrating the transnational and regional influences that fed into Calderón’s policy decisions.

Calderón’s reformist policies faced some resistance in the Constitutional Congress, despite the PRN’s majority. His proposed expansion to the administrative structures that were needed to administer the social security programme proved controversial, as did the programme’s eligibility. What emerged was a system of compulsory social security payments for workers on lower incomes while wealthier citizens could opt out from the system and access private healthcare, a watering down of Calderón’s initial proposals. Unlike other Latin American countries, the eligibility for social security was set by income rather than by profession or trade. In part, these decision were based on the resources available as much as ideological considerations (though those were certainly present); Costa Rica in the early 1940s lacked the resources to establish a more universal public healthcare system.

Calderón also took Costa Rica into the Second World War, joining other central American states in supporting the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Costa Rica did not make a significant contribution to the war, though it did suffer a German U-boat attack in 1942. More substantial was Costa Rica’s contribution to the American-led internment programme against citizens of Axis countries, under substantial American economic pressure. During the Second World War, most of which fell under Calderón’s presidency, it is estimated that hundreds of German, Italian and Japanese citizens were internally detained or deported to the United States, where they also endured internment. The U-boat attack in 1942 also triggered a wave of anti-German looting in San Pablo, affecting more than 120 German-owned shops.

Opposition to Calderón’s reform agenda, concerns at allegations of electoral fraud—the 1942 congressional mid-term elections saw another landslide victory for the PRN—and, in some quarters, outrage at the treatment of Axis citizens, led to growing opposition, particularly among the coffee oligarchs. Indeed, Germany had been a major source of coffee exports prior to the war, while descendants of German immigrants were well represented among the landowner class. Wartime trade disruption also led to shortages of goods such as food, gasoline, tires, cement and steel, shortages which Calderón’s government proved ill equipped to deal with. Rumours abounded of coup plots, though none came to fruition.

To build societal consent for his reforms and combat his opponents, Calderón assembled a curious civic coalition. On the one hand, he reached out to the Catholic Church, promoting a brand of Christian socialism that he had been influenced by in Belgium. Although he could not bring the entirety of the church behind him, with conservative clergy officials continuing to oppose his agenda, he made considerable inroads.

Notably, he gained the support of the newly seated Archbishop of San José, Victor Sanabria, a figure who had risen from a humble background and who had campaigned for many of the social reforms that Calderón was enacting in power. Like Calderón, Sanabria had also been influenced by the reformist ideas that he had picked up during his time in Europe, which viewed Christian social reformism as an alternative to Marxism.

At the same time, in the second half of his term, Calderón reached an agreement with the Communist Party and Manuel Mora. The party was willing to moderate somewhat in exchange for the opportunity to influence state policy, even changing its name in 1943 to the Popular Vanguard Party and reforming itself along non-communist roots. This helped to glue together Calderón’s alliance; Archbishop Sanabria proceeded to announce that membership of the PVP was compatible with membership of the church.

Indeed, the Communist Party had claimed partial credit for Calderón’s social reforms—the Social Guarantees in particular—stating in 1941 that “We ourselves have fertilized the ground so that the seed can be sown.” This alliance helped Calderón make inroads among parts of the labour movement and also gave Calderón and the PRN Government access to militias under communist control, something that would become significant in the coming years.

The alliance between Calderón, the clergy and communists reshaped Costa Rican politics and laid the foundation for the ideology of Calderonism, a fluid, populist, social Christian outlook that would remain enormously influential throughout the twentieth century and has sometimes been compared to the influence of Peronism in Argentina. Calderón’s critics began accusing him of what they called ‘Caldero-communism’ and of establishing a nascent dictatorship.

Unlike his predecessor, Calderón made no attempt to extend his period in power and stood down at the end of his term in 1944. However, also unlike his predecessor, Calderón had reshaped both the country and his PRN to the extent that he was able to retain substantial influence out of office.

His handpicked successor, Teodoro Picado, the President of the Constitutional Congress and a prominent historian, was endorsed by both Archbishop Sanabria and by Mora and the Popular Vanguard Party, thereby bringing together the entire Calderonist coalition behind his candidacy. Moreover, the PRN Government was growing increasingly comfortable utilising state resources for the benefit of its election campaigns, while accusations of electoral fraud markedly increased throughout the 1940s. Picado accordingly won another landslide victory for the PRN in 1944, against none other than former president León Cortés, who had turned against his former party after Calderón reneged on his pledge to support his candidacy for the PRN.

Although not entirely a puppet of Calderón, Picado’s presidency was very much understood as keeping the seat warm for his predecessor, who indeed sought a second term at the next election in 1948. This election would benefit from its own full episode, but it significantly shaped Calderón’s continuing legacy in Costa Rica.

To very briefly summarise, the PRN’s string of landslide victories that began in 1940 came to an end as Calderón lost fairly decisively to the high-profile newspaper owner, Otilio Ulate. Both sides made accusations of electoral fraud and violence began to spill out onto the streets. The Constitutional Congress, controlled by the PRN and the Popular Vanguard Party, voted to annul the election and call for a new vote, allowing Picado to continue serving as president on an acting basis.

This turn of events precipitated the six-week Costa Rican civil war, when an uprising led by José Figueres, a businessman briefly exiled under Calderón’s presidency, successfully overthrew the Picado Government with the aid of the Caribbean Legion, a transnational group of pro-democracy and Marxist guerillas that included Fidel Castro among its members. Calderón was sent into exile with Picanto while Figueres established a provisional Government that drafted a new constitution. Among other things, the new constitution abolished the Costa Rican military, leaving Costa Rica one of the few countries in the world to this date that does not possess a standing army.

Yet, this spectacular defeat would not be the end of Calderón’s political career. He fled first to Nicaragua and then to Mexico, where he reverted to practising as a doctor. In this time, his political rival, José Figueres, reshaped the Costa Rican state and was democratically elected to a full term in office in the 1950s under the banner of his National Liberation Party, while Calderón’s political reputation was one of failure and disgrace. He gained the status as a villain to Figueres, who assumed a status as a national hero—although, Calderón did retain some support in the country. The PRN was temporarily banned but was permitted to begin contesting elections again from 1953.

Costa Rica’s third post-war president, Mario Echandi, allowed figures from the defeated side of the civil war to return to the country in 1958, including Calderón himself. Not content to return home as a private citizen, Calderón threw himself into political activity once again, getting elected to the Legislative Assembly—the body that replaced the Constitutional Congress under the 1949 constitution—and even made a third attempt at the presidency. In 1962—another election that would warrant its own episode—Calderón went down to a second defeat, this time against Francisco Orlich, an ally of Figueres. Calderón won just 35% of the vote, a far cry from the 85% he achieved in 1940. Ironically, the election was also contested by Otilio Ulate, whose victory Calderón had sought to overturn 14 years previously, though he came a distant third.

Even this defeat did not bring Calderón’s political career to a close, as in 1966 he was appointed Costa Rica’s ambassador to Mexico, the country where he had lived in exile just eight years earlier—quite a redemption arc! He served until 1969 and then, after 36 tumultuous years as a leading figure in Costa Rican politics, died in 1970 at the age of 70.

Nor did Calderón’s death end his influence in Costa Rica. In 1974, he was named ‘Benefactor of the Homeland’ by the Legislative Assembly, and the ideology of Calderonism lived on. A two-party system emerged between the 1970s and 1990s and one of the parties, the Social Christian Unity Party, positioned itself as the inheritor of Calderón’s legacy. The other party was Figueres’ National Liberation Party, ensuring that the political divisions of the 1940s would continue to define Costa Rican politics into the 1990s.

Calderón’s son, Rafael Ángel Calderón, was a key figure in the Social Christian Unity Party, contesting elections in 1982, 1986 and 1990. He was finally successful on the latter occasion, serving as president between 1990 and 1994—when he was succeeded by José María Figueres, the son of José Figueres, who returned to contest a presidential election as recently as 2022. The two-party system was as much a product of those two opposing dynasties as it was deep-rooted ideological differences.

The 1940 Costa Rican presidential election was not, at first glance, especially significant. The PRN remained in control of Costa Rica’s governing institutions and the election was relatively uncontested, allowing Rafael Calderón to be elected president without any great opposition. Yet, the 1940 election set Costa Rica onto a political trajectory that would shape the next half century. Under Calderón, the ‘Liberal State’ gave way to the ‘Reform State’ and the PRN consolidated power throughout the 1940s, only to be overthrown during the dramatic events of 1948. A turning point in Costa Rican history, the political cleavages and dynasties that emerged in the aftermath of the 1940 election provided the country with its key partisan divides for many decades to come.

Such tensions embodied many of the faultlines prevalent in mid-twentieth century global politics, particularly in Latin America. A literal “banana republic,” Costa Rica had a particularly intense experience of debates on the relationship between the state and its citizens; the state’s social responsibilities to the wellbeing of its people, the extent to which it intervenes in their lives to secure that wellbeing, and the form of government that determines such relationships. The 1940 election steered Costa Rica in a much greater interventionist direction and, though not resolved for another eight years, the conflict this course provoked led to Costa Rica’s modern identity as a stable, demilitarised and social democratic country.

Reading List

John A. Booth, ‘Costa Rican Democracy,’ World Affairs 150.1 (Summer 1987), pp. 43-53.

Fabrice E. Lehoucq and Ivan Molina, Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Mark B. Rosenberg, ‘Social Reform in Costa Rica: Social Security and the Presidency of Rafael Angel Calderón,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 61.2 (1981), pp. 278-296.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historyofelections.substack.com

In 1989, Taiwan held its last supplementary election under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui.

Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the second episode of the History of Elections podcast, where we will be exploring the 1989 supplementary election in Taiwan. The election was the last to be held under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui.

December, 1989. Revolutions topple communist governments across eastern Europe: the Romanian Revolution overthrows long-term dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is executed within weeks of the first protests; the East German parliament votes to abolish the Socialist Unity Party’s monopoly on power, paving the way for liberal Manfred Gerlach to be elected the first non-communist Chairman of the State Council; Lithuania becomes the first Soviet republic to end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power; and Václav Havel is elected the first non-Communist President of Czechoslovakia since 1948. Elsewhere, rebel forces led by Charles Taylor cross the border into Liberia from Ivory Coast, triggering the First Liberian Civil War; the United States launches an invasion of Panama—a sentence that gave me less anxiety when I first wrote it a month ago—to overthrow the country’s dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had clung on to power after losing an election; the Japanese Nikkei 225 stock market index reaches a record high, continuing a remarkable trend of what seemed to be endless growth; and, in Taiwan, voters went to the polls in a supplementary election to the Republic of China’s parliament.

Background

The modern polity of Taiwan emerged out of the Chinese Civil War, when the defeated nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to the island in 1949 in what was intended to be a temporary retreat until—it was hoped—they could launch a renewed invasion of the mainland and the people of mainland China would rise up to overthrew the Communist Party.

Taiwan had previously been occupied by Japan for 50 years between 1895 and 1945, reverting to Chinese administration upon Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Taiwan’s history prior to that lies at the heart of the modern debate over its constitutional status: the island has been inhabited by an indigenous Austronesian people for about 15,000 years but, from 1684, the island was annexed and colonised by the Qing Dynasty of China. Today, indigenous Taiwanese make up just 2 per cent of the island’s population, but this constitutional history contributed to a broader political tendency in postwar Taiwan that rejects, either in part or in full, Chinese claims to the island.

Following the civil war, Taiwan has been administered as a continuation of the Republic of China, with control only over the island of Taiwan itself and some nearby smaller islands. The victorious communist forces of Mao Zedong, which ruled mainland China as the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, from 1949, lacked the military capability to invade the island and, as the United States adopted a policy of containment against communist states, it was later deterred by the threat of American intervention from making any attempt to do so.

Thus, Taiwan existed as a de facto state, although it claimed to be the continuation of the legitimate Chinese Government – and indeed, the administration in Taiwan represented the entirety of China at the United Nations until 1971, a status that, in the early 1960s, US President John Kennedy commented, ‘really doesn’t make any sense.’

The island was governed by Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party, or KMT, under a dominant-party system, Chiang serving as the ‘President of the Republic of China’ until his death in 1975. For some Taiwanese, this government represented rule by a class of ‘mainlanders’ who had previously governed mainland China and comprised 10 to 20% of the island’s population.

Viewing itself as the legitimate government of China at a time of crisis, Chiang’s KMT government ruled the island under martial law – or, officially, the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion. This was considered necessary in light of the ongoing threat of invasion from the mainland.

This marked a continuation of how the island had been governed even before the conclusion of the civil war. In 1947, an uprising in Taiwan was violently suppressed by government forces—then representing nationalist forces based in the mainland. Information on this event, which has come to be known as the ‘February 28 incident,’ was effectively suppressed, but tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed during the uprising and in the subsequent crackdown. This violent repression, referred to as the ‘White Terror,’ continued after KMT forces retreated to the island in 1949. Notably, in the aftermath of this uprising, discussions within the United States government on resolving the situation in Taiwan took it for granted that the island’s population would opt for independence if given a free vote.

In accordance with the Republic of China’s constitution, although orchestrated under martial law and the KMT’s grip on power, Chiang Kai-shek was re-elected President through indirect votes in parliament held every six years, using emergency measures to bypass the constitutional term limit. The system was not entirely a one-party state and had two legally-permitted opposition parties—the China Democratic Socialist Party and the Young China Party—but the KMT maintained absolute control over state institutions. After one theoretically contested vote in 1954, when Chiang won 96.9% of parliamentary ballots, he was elected unopposed in 1960, 1966 and 1972.

Competitive elections were tolerated at the district level, although the ban on opposition parties meant that critics of the regime had to run as independents in an uneven political landscape where pro-Government candidates received financial and campaign support from the KMT. Moreover, local politicians who were deemed to pose a substantial threat to the KMT continued to be persecuted, encouraging genuine opposition politicians to remain focused on local issues.

This autocratic system continued upon Chiang’s death. After a three-year interlude in which Chiang’s Vice President, Yen Chia-kan, fulfilled the remainder of his term, Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, the former head of the island’s secret police and the incumbent Premier, was elected unopposed by parliamentarians in 1978 and again in 1984.

At the legislative level, Taiwan continued to be governed by the Republic of China’s parliament, which also decamped to the island in 1949. The parliament operated under a tricameral structure, with the lower house Legislative Yuan, upper house Control Yuan, and the National Assembly, which was charged with electing the President and Vice President and amending the constitution. As a representative body for the entirety of China, these three houses could not be re-elected or replenished by mainland territories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Thus, their members—an overwhelming majority of whom represented mainland districts—held their seats until the day that an election could be conducted on the mainland. It became increasingly clear that this meant holding their seats for life in a structure known as the ‘non-re-elected congress.’ Upon the death of a sitting member, mainland exiles from the same region of China were appointed to take their place.

Supplementary Elections and Gradual Reform

As time passed and it became apparent that the KMT would not sweep back to power in the mainland, this system slowly began to adapt to the reality that it solely represented Taiwan. Mainland members who died off were not replaced at the same rate and new elected seats for the island of Taiwan gradually began to be created. These seats were predominantly filled by supplementary elections, the first of which was held in 1969, but some seats to represent overseas nationals were appointed by the president. The new representatives initially comprised less than 3% of the total parliament, but this proportion grew over time.

The elections began to be held every three years for the Legislative Yuan and every six years for the National Assembly. The electoral process remained dominated by the KMT, which won the vast majority of seats in every election held under Chiang dynastic rule, alongside a small number of government-friendly independents and representatives from the Young China Party. The majority of representatives elected in these elections tended to be native-born Taiwanese, and the elections ensured that Taiwan was more heavily represented in the parliament—which continued to claim to represent the entirety of China—than its population alone could justify. These elections can thereby be viewed as marking the early foundations of a distinctly Taiwanese legislature.

Despite Chiang Ching-kuo’s former role as director of the island’s secret police, having overseen arbitrary arrests, torture and execution of political opponents, as President, he began to loosen some of the political restrictions that had been imposed by his father.

The early years of his presidency were not promising in that regard. The Tangwai movement, meaning ‘outside the party,’ had emerged in the 1970s demanding political reform and a greater emphasis on Taiwanese identity. The movement exploded onto the political scene amid riots in 1977 triggered by a blatant act of vote rigging in a local election. Such demands were fuelled by Taiwan’s emerging economic prosperity—between 1953 and 1990, the state averaged a 9% annual growth in GDP—and its growing middle class.

In 1979, security services cracked down on pro-democracy activists and arrested the Tangwai leadership. The crackdown was in part an attempt by Chiang Ching-kuo to manage relations with KMT hardliners, but he continued tentative steps towards political opening in the 1980s.

The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, was formed out of the Tangwai movement in 1986. The party was not initially legally recognised by the authorities, but nor was it forcibly dismantled, and its members were allowed to contest elections as independent candidates. Chiang Ching-kuo proceed to formally end the island’s state of martial law in 1987, allowing for a further degree of political opening in Taiwan.

These reforms were partly motivated by the Republic of China’s diminishing global status. The western détente with the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s helped pave the way for formal recognition of the reality that, at this point, had existed for over 20 years. In 1971, the Republic of China lost its recognition at the United Nations, and in 1979 the United States formally recognised the People’s Republic. As the PRC demanded sole recognition as the representative government of China, this required formally—if not necessarily informally—cutting ties with Taipei.

By the 1980s, only a few dozen states continued to recognise the Republic of China, leaving the state internationally isolated—although it continued to receive support from the United States. Thus, political reform was seen as a means of improving relations with western states. However, Chiang never relinquished the KMT’s firm control over state institutions, and meaningful electoral competition was never allowed under his rule.

Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988 at the age of 77. Despite an attempt by KMT hardliners to hijack the succession, he was succeeded by his vice president and heir apparent, Lee Teng-hui, a Christian, Taiwan-born politician and American-educated agricultural economist who had previously served as Mayor of Taipei, the Republic of China’s acting capital. Chiang had committed in 1985 that his successor would not be another member of his family, declaring that such a question ‘only exists in despotic and totalitarian countries,’ and not in the Republic of China—and he got his wish.

Lee continued Chiang Ching-kuo’s political reforms and, over time, revealed himself to be politically closer to the pro-democracy activists and Taiwanese sovereigntists than anyone had expected. His ascension to power has been described by Jonathan Manthorpe as the ‘end of mainlander colonialism in the island.’

Lee released political prisoners and appointed substantial numbers of native-born Taiwanese to the government, further eroding the dominance of mainlanders and their descendants. Lee also began to allow, or even encourage, symbols of Taiwanese identity and statehood, a process of ‘Taiwanization’ that gradually moved away from the legal fiction that his government represented the entirety of China. Bank notes were printed by the central bank rather than the Provincial Bank of Taiwan, and the Taiwan Provincial Government was weakened.

In this environment of political liberalisation, there began the stirrings of a national debate—which continues to this day—on whether Taiwan should formalise its independence, establish a new constitution and declare itself an independent country, rather than maintaining its legal identity as the Republic of China. This debate played out in the press and advocates of independence were more commonly found among veterans of the Tangwai movement and the DPP. One such article, published in the United Daily News paper, argued for a new constitution on the grounds that the existing 1947 Republic of China constitution treated Taiwan as a ‘little child wearing oversized shoes.’

Opponents of such a path, which included the KMT, remained committed to the mission of overthrowing communism in the Chinese mainland—a prospect that seemed more likely in the late 1980s, as the PRC entered a period of political turmoil. Alternatively, if communism did prevail in the mainland, it was feared that a formal declaration of independence could provide the PRC with a justification to launch a naval blockade on the island. James Soong, the KMT general secretary of the KMT, claimed that independence would turn Taiwan into ‘another Beirut,’ referring to the devastation and foreign intervention produced by the ongoing Lebanese Civil War.

The 1989 Supplementary Election Campaign

That brings us to the supplementary election held in December 1989, the seventh such election since the system of supplementary elections was introduced in 1969. 130 new seats in the Legislative Yuan were created, the largest number yet for a supplementary election. Only 101 of these seats were elected in the ‘Taiwan Province,’ alongside the municipalities of Taipei and Kaohsiung, with the other 29 seats appointed by the president to represent overseas nationals.

This was the first election held since Lee Teng-hui ascended to the presidency to complete the remainder of Chiang Ching-kuo’s term, and also the first to be held since the revocation of martial law. Although some liberalisation had taken place, this was not a free, fair or pluralistic election, with numerous accusations of vote-buying, bribery, illicit campaign financing and other irregularities made against both Government and opposition candidates. Violent attacks against candidates—particularly those that had defected from the KMT—also led some to begin wearing bullet-proof vests as they campaigned.

In the 1989 Freedom House Report, on a scale of 2 to 14, with 2 being most free and 14 being least free, Taiwan scored a middling score of 8, compared to mainland China’s score or 12. Those numbers should be caveated by the fact that, prior to 1990, Freedom House’s numbers were largely the product of one social scientist with some reported bias in favour of US allies; but the numbers provide a general baseline for understanding Taiwan in this period as an autocratic but not totalitarian state.

Ahead of the supplementary election, the Legislative Yuan contained 308 members, within which the KMT held a supermajority of 275 members. With the addition of just 101 elected members, it was mathematically impossible for the KMT to lose its majority, meaning that, at face value, the stakes were pretty low.

However, there was nevertheless increased political competition. Notably, this included within the KMT itself, which held primary elections six months ahead of the legislative election to nominate its candidates, granting greater power to its claimed 2 million party members to influence the party’s direction. According to Ts’ai Ling and Ramon H. Myers, ‘a new spirit of activism swept the rank and file’ of the KMT, resulting in the nomination of candidates that had not been supported by the senior party leadership. Once the primaries were over, the KMT campaigned on its 40-year record of ruling Taiwan, emphasising its experience in driving economic prosperity and social stability.

Members of the DPP also contested the election. The party was undergoing a process of ideological radicalisation towards a position that favoured an explicitly independent national identity for Taiwan, breaking away from the island’s identity as the Republic of China. This process was driven by the return of overseas pro-independence activists who had previously been banned from Taiwan.

The DPP’s chairperson, Huang Hsin-chieh, was from a Taiwanese family and had sat as one of the permanent legislators in the Legislative Yuan since 1969. A founder of the Tangwai movement, he had been arrested in 1979 and was imprisoned until 1987. The party’s official strategy was to ‘use the localities to surround the centre,’ seeking to build grassroots support and win local offices in order to increase pressure on the KMT. The KMT countered this with a strategy of consolidating support with local clients and patrons.

The DPP’s formal political platform called for various reforms of the political system, including democratic reforms to the legislature, direct elections for the president, provincial governor and the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung, strengthening the independence of the judiciary and increasing civilian oversight over the military. It also called for tax cuts, privatisations, environmental protections, and pointed to the positive record of its party members who had been elected to magistrate positions across Taiwan. Going into the election, the DPP’s aim was to elect 20 new members, which would give the party enough support in parliament to have the right to introduce legislation, and to reach 30% of the popular vote.

The election was also contested by the Young China Party, which remained friendly towards the KMT government.

On average, each seat in the Legislative Yuan was contested by three candidates, providing a degree of electoral competition. The KMT provided more candidates than any other party, nominating 139 candidates, which was more than the 101 seats available due to a breakdown of party discipline in some seats, another indication of the party’s eroding central control. The DPP nominated 58 candidates and the Young China Party nominated 3 candidates, alongside 100 other independent and minor party candidates. The vast majority of candidates—86%—were men, with just 26 women running for parliament. Some of these women ran for the DPP to represent husbands who had been imprisoned, disappeared or killed under KMT rule.

During the election campaign, former dissidents such as Lin Yi-hsiung and Kuo Pei-hung toured Taiwan holding rallies calling for independence and support for the DPP, an indication of the more liberal environment that the election took place in.

The election was observed by a number of foreign observers, including the chairman of the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, Stephen Solarz, and hundreds of foreign correspondents.

Polling ahead of the election consistently found leads for the KMT, in some cases very sizable leads. However, it also detected substantial voter apathy, suggesting a lower turnout than in past elections.

Elections were also held to elect country magistrates, county councils, city mayoralties, city councils and the Taiwan Provincial Council, with similar results.

Results and Aftermath

On election day, 12.6 million Taiwanese were eligible to vote. The polling was proved wrong as turnout reached a 10-year high of 72%. Election day was generally peaceful, with the exception of in Hsinying, where supporters of the local DPP candidate attacked the county government office, in a race that also saw the KMT make erroneous accusations of ballot-rigging.

As expected, the KMT swept the elections at both the legislative and local level. Of the 101 directly elected seats available to the Legislative Yuan, the KMT picked up 72, with 21 going to the DPP—just over the party’s target of 20. Of the total seats added to the Legislative Yuan, the Kuomintang represented 94—an even greater majority. The KMT won 59.7% of the popular vote, down from the two-thirds it normally tended to win; a modest reduction in support. Meanwhile, the DPP won 28.7%, close to its target of securing 30% of the vote.

This marked a decisive victory for the KMT and demonstrated that there was real popular support for the party even once some of the political restrictions began to be lifted. Contemporary analyses drew comparisons with elections held across Eastern Europe in 1989, where authoritarian regimes that had been in power for a similar length of time were swept from power once their monopoly on power was removed. It was clear that similar developments would not take place in Taiwan.

Nevertheless, the KMT was disappointed with its result, and many of its leaders apologised after the election for what they considered to be a poor result. Lee Teng-hui described the result as a ‘defeat,’ and James Soong travelled to the seven counties where the KMT had lost magistrate and mayor races and vowed to win them back at the next election. Other officials within the KMT mused on the implications of accepting the DPP as Taiwan’s formal opposition.

The election was held just six months after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, when a concurrent pro-democracy movement in the PRC was brutally suppressed by the military, which opened fire on protesters, most of whom were students, producing a death toll into the hundreds and perhaps even thousands. Thousands more activists were detained, imprisoned, tortured and executed in the months after the crackdown. The massacre did not in itself directly influence the election in Taiwan, as the KMT government attempted to suppress media reporting of the event in order to maintain its stable relations with the PRC. However, it can be seen as another turning point in the political trajectories of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland; where one gradually offered concessions to the democracy movement and liberalised its political system, the other responded with force and oppression.

The 1989 supplementary election would be Taiwan’s last supplementary election held under the system established in 1969. As he settled into power, Lee Teng-hui accelerated the country’s process of democratisation. Taiwan participated in what has sometimes been described as the ‘third wave of democratisation’ between the 1970s and 1990s, a process that consolidated after the end of the Cold War, as Soviet-aligned countries adapted to the loss of their major sponsor, and US-aligned countries—like Taiwan—could no longer solely rely on their status as anti-communist bulwarks to continue gaining western support.

In 1991, Lee Teng-hui ended the practice of lifetime membership in the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly, paving the way for legislative elections in 1991 and 1992 that reflected the now 40-year reality of political life in the island and elected members who solely represented Taiwan. The KMT retained a majority in both elections but they proved far more competitive than any that that had been held previously. This then led to the first direct presidential election in 1996 in which Lee was re-elected under broadly free and fair conditions and then, ultimately, Taiwan’s first democratic transition of power in 2000, when the DPP narrowly gained control of the presidency. Stepping down peacefully at the end of his term in 2000, Lee has come to be known by the monicker of ‘Mr Democracy.’

Taiwan’s 1989 supplementary election marked an end point for an era of the island’s political history characterised by KMT autocratic rule and political structures that operated under the assumption of imminent reunification with the mainland. Elements of the changes that would occur in Taiwanese politics were perceptible in the results: the expanded number of Taiwanese representatives, moving closer to an acceptance that the legislature represented the island of Taiwan rather than the entirety of China, and growing political representation for the political opposition led by the DPP.

These developments also fuelled continued conflict with the PRC in two key ways. Firstly, the KMT’s willingness to loosen its grip on power and allow for greater pluralism gave representation to those who advocated a greater focus on Taiwanese identity, or even an outright declaration of Taiwanese independence and an abandonment of the polity’s identity as the Republic of China. The act of dismantling the pan-Chinese parliamentary institutions to focus on representation within Taiwan itself signalled to Beijing that the island was moving in such a direction. Secondly, the emergence of democracy and political pluralism in Taiwan has threatened the PRC’s claims that such a political system is incompatible with Chinese culture and history and provided a nearby, alternative model of governance, an issue that the policy of ‘one country, two systems’—as also applied to Hong Kong—has attempted to resolve.

I personally find this period of Taiwanese history really interesting because of what it can tell us about the role of island geographies in driving political differentiation. In an extremely different context, I completed a PhD last year exploring how island geographies have contributed to distinctive attitudes towards politics and constitutional issues in island communities in Scotland, and I found that, in these communities, many people have a belief that their ‘islandness’ warrants separate policies and, at times, separate governing arrangements from the mainland. Taiwan is a very different context, both culturally and historically, but it is clearly an example of how an island geography has facilitated a differentiated political development through, in this case, military logistics—it is hard to invade islands—and separate historical, cultural and social development.

Lee Teng-hui lived until the age of 97, dying in 2020. The President at the time, Tsai Ing-wen, who was the DPP’s second President, granted full honours to the leader whose democratising policies had made it possible for her to come to power. At his funeral, she vowed to ‘continue along the path of democracy, freedom, diversity and openness’ that he had charted.

Thank you for listening, and join us next time as we travel back to the 1940 general election in Costa Rica, held towards the tail-end of the first Costa Rican Republic as a period of stability gave way to civil war.

Further Reading:

Tien, Hung-mao, & Shiau, Chyuan-heng, ‘Taiwan’s Democratization: A Summary,’ World Affairs 155.2 (Fall 1992), pp. 58-61.

Mainwaring, Scott, & Bizzarro, Fernando, ‘The Fates of Third-Wave Democracies,’ Journal of Democracy 30.1 (January 2019), pp. 99-113.

Manthorpe, Jonathan, Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Ts’ai, Ling & Myers, Ramon H., ‘Winds of Democracy: The 1989 Taiwan Elections,’ Asian Survey 30.4 (April 1990), pp. 360-379.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historyofelections.substack.com

In 1969, West Germany held its sixth federal election since the end of the Allied occupation. The election produced Germany's first social democratic Chancellor in 40 years.

Transcript:Hello and welcome to the first full episode of the History of Elections podcast, where we will be exploring the 1969 federal election in West Germany. The sixth election held in West Germany since the end of the Allied occupation, it brought an end to 20 years of Christian Democratic rule and brought in Germany’s first Social Democratic government since 1930, leading to significant change in the country’s domestic and, especially, foreign policy.

September, 1969. A coup in Libya overthrows King Idris and installs Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as the country’s leader, who would rule for the next 42 years. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded in Morocco, bringing together leaders and representatives of 24 Muslim-majority states. The People’s Republic of China conducts its first underground nuclear test and ninth nuclear test in total, solidifying the country’s status as the world’s fifth nuclear power. Ho Chi Minh, President of North Vietnam and founding Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, dies at the age of 79. And in West Germany, a federal election is held, as Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger faces the electorate for the first time.

Background

In the decades following the end of the Allied occupation in 1949, the politics of West Germany – known formally as the Federal Republic of Germany – was dominated by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. Between 1949 and 1969, the CDU governed West Germany in an alliance the Bavarian Christian Social Union, or CSU, a slightly more conservative party that operated, as one would expect, in the state of Bavaria. Referred to together as the Union Parties, the CDU and CSU existed – and continue to exist – as independent parties. However, they caucus together in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and they do not compete against each other in elections, the CDU choosing not to contest elections in Bavaria in favour of its sister party.

The Union parties were the local German proponents of Christian Democracy, an ideological tendency that flourished across much of Western Europe in the postwar years. Characterised by moderation, pragmatism and emphasising the virtues of family life and national stability, Christian Democrats sought to bridge the divisions between the political left and right that had dominated European politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This left Christian Democratic parties well placed to seize the postwar zeitgeist of security and renewal. They typically endorsed liberal democratic forms of government and accepted the creation of moderate welfare states within a liberal, mixed economy framework. This enabled significant scope for collaboration and sometimes formal coalitions with social democrats, the other major political tendency in postwar Europe. Christian Democrats also championed the European integration process that would eventually culminate in the creation of the European Union.

In Germany, the CDU strove to overcome historical divisions between the largely protestant north and catholic south that had riven German politics for the past century. By advocating for a unified, moderate Christian political identity, the CDU hoped to build an electoral coalition that could overcome the legacies of both the Weimar and Nazi periods.

This approach proved very successful in West Germany. The Union parties won between 45% and 50% of the vote in every federal election between 1953 and 1969. They led every government in this period, including under the CDU’s founding leader, Konrad Adenauer, who served as Chancellor for 14 years between 1949 and 1963. In the 1950s, the Union parties appeared, in the words of Mary Fulbrook, to be on an ‘unbeatable ascendancy.’ Such ascendancy began to gradually reverse in the 1960s as the Union Parties became embroiled in policy disagreements and scandals – most notably, in 1962, controversy surrounding the raiding of a newspaper office ultimately precipitated Adenauer’s resignation.

The Union parties’ political success was fuelled by a period of remarkable postwar economic recovery in West Germany known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘economic miracle,’ aided by European integration, the US Marshall Plan of financial aid, global economic conditions and effective policies implemented by Adenauer’s governments. By the 1960s, West Germany’s GDP per capita and industrial output had both more than doubled while unemployment had fallen below 1%.

Nevertheless, West Germany’s proportional voting system prevented the Union parties from governing alone and they spent the postwar decades leading successive coalitions, usually with the liberal Free Democratic Party. Only once, in 1957, did the Union Parties win an outright majority, although on that occasion they chose to retain a coalition with one other party.

These Christian Democrat-led governments did not, of course, govern all of Germany. The regions of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War gained independence in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, controlled by the authoritarian Socialist Unity Party under Soviet influence. Both states initially claimed   to be the sole legitimate representative of the German people. Attempts to reunify the two German states were scuppered by heightening tensions between east and west at the outset of the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain between NATO and the Warsaw Pact came to divide Germany in half.

Although indisputably one of West Germany’s two major parties in this period, the centre-left Social Democratic Party remained in opposition for the first 17 years of West German independence. The party had been strengthened by its resistance to the Nazi regime and increased support for social democratic policies in the aftermath of the Second World War, gaining votes from about a third of the West German electorate. The Social Democrats grew their support base during this period in political opposition, rising from 29% in 1949 to 39% in 1965.

The Social Democrats’ time in opposition came to an end in 1966. The coalition between the Union parties and the    Free Democratic Party, which had been in power since 1961, collapsed due to the FDP’s opposition to raising taxes to balance the federal budget. Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer’s successor, tendered his resignation and a new government was formed by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the sitting Minister-President – head of government - of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg. With just three factions represented in the Bundestag, Kiesinger’s only alternative to governing with the Free Democrats was to bring the Social Democrats into government.

Both factions were motivated by a strong desire to avoid a return to the political instability that had undermined the Weimar Republic and that risked strengthening the extraparliamentary left and right. Meanwhile, the SPD was keen to demonstrate that it was capable of governing, although many members were sceptical of the idea of governing with the Union parties.  Thus, Germany’s first ‘grand coalition’ of the two major factions was formed, representing 90% of the Bundestag. It continued to govern until the next scheduled election in 1969.

Kiesinger’s grand coalition implemented several domestic reforms which subtly expanded the West German welfare state and embraced neo-Keynesian policies. The government gained new powers of economic intervention; student grants and support for vocational training were introduced; and sick leave and pension coverage were both extended. Internationally, Kiesinger largely kept to the status quo, maintaining West Germany’s place within the western alliance. However, he made some moves to reduce Cold War tensions, establishing formal diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.

State elections held between 1965 and 1969 produced strong results for the CDU, suggesting that the senior partner in the grand coalition might claim the greatest electoral dividends.

The 1969 election also took place in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests that swept much of the western world and proved especially vociferous in West Germany, where young Germans protested against the country’s incomplete denazification process and the continued presence of former Nazi officials within state institutions. This notably included Kiesinger himself, who had occupied a senior role within the Nazi propaganda apparatus during the Second World War. Famously, in 1968, Kiesinger was slapped at a party conference by Beate Klarsfeld, a Nazi-hunter who accused Kiesinger of knowledge of the Holocaust and the production of antisemitic propaganda – both charges that Kiesinger denied. This polarised the country, bringing out multiple public figures both in defence and condemnation of Klarsfeld’s actions.

By the time of the 1969 federal election, the three-year-old grand coalition was on the verge of collapse. Once again, the point of contention was economic policy. The economic boom had come to an end, a fact exemplified by a recession in 1966, which drove unemployment up to 750,000 people. The Social Democrats proposed revaluing the Deutsche Mark, West Germany’s currency, to respond to these economic difficulties. However, this was opposed by the CSU, in part due to the detrimental effect the policy would have on Bavarian farming interests.  

Additionally, West Germany’s presidential election, held six months previously, produced further splits in the grand coalition. Elected by members of the federal and state parliaments, the presidential election led to a close contest between Gustav Heinemann, supported by the Social Democratic Party and Free Democratic Party, and Gerhard Schröder – no, not that one – supported by the Union parties and the far-right National Democratic Party. In the final round, Heineman defeated Schröder by just six votes, becoming the first Social Democratic President of West Germany. This divide would prove prophetic of West German political divisions over the coming decade.

The 1969 Campaign

By this point, West German politics had consolidated into a two-and-a-half party system – or two and three quarters, if you count the CSU. Kiesinger led the Union parties into the election, seeking a second term in office and his first direct mandate as Chancellor. The CSU campaign in Bavaria was fronted by its long-term leader and the incumbent Finance Minister, Franz Josef-Strauss. The Free Democrat campaign was led by Walter Scheel, former Minister of Economic Cooperation and sitting Vice President of the Bundestag.

The Social Democrats, meanwhile, presented Willy Brandt, West Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister under the grand coalition, as its Chancellor candidate. Brandt – born with the name Herbert Frahm – was a former resistance journalist based in Sweden during the war who had adopted the name ‘Willy Brandt’ as a pseudonym to avoid detection by Nazi spies. He rose up through politics as the Mayor of West Berlin – then an enclave territory within East Germany -   and became the Social Democratic Party’s leader in 1964, going on to lead the party’s election campaign in 1965 where he secured 39% of the list vote. This was the best result in the party’s 90-year history, although it still fell in second place behind the Union parties.

The Bundestag was elected using a form of mixed-member proportional representation, which saw 248 constituency seats  elected and at least 248 additional list seats allocated proportionally to produce a result proportional to the share of list votes. All parties that secured over 5% of the federal list vote or that picked up three constituency seats were entitled to their full share of list seats, a system intended to prevent a return to the political fragmentation and difficult coalition building that had bedevilled the Weimer Republic. There was also the possibility of parties gaining additional seats called ‘overhang seats’ if the existing list seats were not enough to ensure parties received the full number of proportional seats that they were entitled to, allowing the Bundestag to grow and shrink in size from election to election. However, in 1969, no overhang seats were awarded.

Opinion polling during 1969 found that the Social Democrats were considered the most competent party on economic issues, education and ‘Eastern’ policy, whereas the Union parties were only considered the most competent with regard to foreign policy towards the West; a central tenet of postwar government policy. This marked a reverse from 1965, when the Union parties had led on economic competence. Polling also found that voters were predominantly concerned with economic policy during the campaign over ‘Eastern’ policy or reunification, a trend that strengthened as the campaign progressed. As the party that led on economic competency, and as the economic situation improved in the run-up to the election, this favoured the Social Democrats. On the other hand, Kiesinger held a clear lead over Brandt on voters’ preferred Chancellor. One poll in September found that Kiesinger was  favoured by 52% of respondents compared to just 20% who favoured Brandt.

To take advantage of its lead on the issue, the Social Democratic campaign emphasised economic modernisation; one of its election slogans proclaimed: ‘We are building a modern Germany – We have the right men.’ In contrast, the CDU highlighted its reputation for competency. Its posters prominently featured Kiesinger with the slogans: ‘safely into the seventies,’ and ‘It all depends on the Chancellor.’ Given his personal popularity, the CDU’s decision to centre its campaign around Kiesinger may have helped limit the party’s losses in the election. Nevertheless, the CDU campaign was described by one contemporary commentator as ‘patently tired’ and some party officials even commented that the party might benefit from a period in opposition.

For its part, the Free Democratic Party’s campaign centred on a reformist agenda in eastern policy, taxation and education, stances that increased the possibility of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party. Its slogans included the phrase: ‘You can change Germany.’

The campaign received extensive television coverage. Evening programmes covering the election lasted up to two hours and featured panels comprised of the rival leaders answering questions from one another and from members of the public. On the ground, the Social Democrats utilised a strategy called the ‘Social Democratic Voters’ Initiative,’ led by novelist Günter Grass, which featured large public meetings across German towns and cities.

Election Results

As results came in, it became clear that Willy Brandt had once again proved able to extend the Social Democratic Party’s appeal. On an 86.7% turnout, slightly below 1965, the Social Democrats secured a record 42.7% of the list vote, up 3.4 percentage points on 1965, and they won 224 seats, solidifying the party’s position as the largest single party in the Bundestag. The increase was broadly in line with the party’s average increase of 3.3 points in every election since 1953, an increase party strategists apparently referred to as the ‘Comrade Trend.’ The decision to enter into a grand coalition in 1966 and build a reputation for governance appeared to have been vindicated.

However, this was not quite enough to catch up with the Union parties which, despite seeing a small reduction in their vote share, finished with a combined 46.1% of the vote, 3.3 percentage points ahead of the Social Democrats. Their final seat tally was 242 seats, a loss of three from the previous election. This left the Union 18 seats ahead of the Social Democrats and 7 short of a majority. Most of the Social Democrats’ gains came instead from the Free Democratic Party, whose vote share fell from 9.5% to 5.8%, bringing the party down to 30 seats – its worst ever result at that point, and not far above the electoral threshold.

Although one might have expected the Free Democrats to have benefitted from a period in opposition, the party appears to have stopped receiving votes from disaffected supporters of the Union parties now that it was no longer their obvious coalition partner.  One member of the party optimistically commented that it had been ‘slimmed down to a healthy size.’ Some commentators even wondered whether the Free Democratic Party was heading towards extinction, and West Germany towards a fixed two-party system, although such predictions would ultimately turn out to be premature.

No other party secured seats in the Bundestag. However, there was a shock result beneath the 5% threshold. The National Democratic Party, or NPD, had been formed in 1964 as a union of various right-wing and neo-Nazi parties. It first contested the 1965 federal election where it won 2% of the list vote, a slight improvement on its predecessors’ electoral fortunes. But in 1969 the NPD extended these gains further, more than doubling its vote share to reach 4.3% of the list vote, just 0.7 percentage points below the threshold for electing members to the Bundestag.

The success of a party often labelled neo-Nazi in orientation threw into sharp relief onto many of the critiques raised during the 1968 student protests regarding the extent of Germany’s postwar denazification. Various explanations have been put forward by historians to explain this surge. One argument centres the 1968 protest movement itself, suggesting that the NPD benefitted from a right-wing, conservative backlash to the counter-culture. This phenomenon was seen in other western countries – for example, De Gaulle’s 1968 landslide parliamentary victory in France or Richard Nixon’s election in the United States. The establishment of the grand coalition has also been cited as an explanation for the NPD’s rise, having potentially alienated some further right-leaning Union voters – somewhat ironically, given the grand coalition’s intention to preserve political stability. West Germany’s economic downturn towards the end of the decade may also have contributed to dissatisfaction with the established party system.

That said, the NPD’s electoral success should not be overemphasised. The party was disappointed by its result, hoping that recent successes in state elections would translate into winning its first seats in the Bundestag. The party’s association with extraparliamentary violence – solidified by the shooting of left-wing protesters by a steward at a party meeting – appeared to have dampened its political appeal. Moreover, this would be the party’s best result, following which it fell back to just 0.6% in the next election; the party never succeeded in electing MPs at the federal level. Its 1969 surge was a flash in the pan but served to remind mainstream parties that they could not take West Germany’s moderate, consensus postwar political landscape for granted.

The election was also contested by a new party formed ahead of the election called the Action for Democratic Progress. This party was an alliance of smaller socialist, communist, pacifist and trade union movements seeking to build an electoral space to the left of the Social Democratic Party, taking advantage of left-wing disillusionment with the grand coalition. It included the German Communist Party, which had been founded in the previous year as a reconstitution of the banned Communist Party of Germany. For its part, the Social Democrats viewed the Action for Democratic Progress alliance as a communist front, sometimes accused of being a puppet of East Germany and Moscow. The party did not perform well, netting just 0.6% of the federal vote; its best result was 1.5% in the state of Bremen. Most young voters alienated by the status quo seem to have broken for the Social Democrats. The alliance fell apart after the election.

One of the highest-profile candidates for the Action for Democratic Progress was none other than Beate Klarsfeld, who continued her campaign against Chancellor Kiesinger by running against him in his Baden-Wurttemberg constituency of Waldshut. She received just 0.7% of the vote in the constituency, not posing any great electoral threat to Kiesinger, nor did she manage to physically confront him for a second time.

The Union parties remained dominant in the southern states. The CSU exerted its seemingly eternal control over rural Bavaria while the CDU mostly swept Kiesinger’s home state in Baden-Wurttemberg, both benefitting from particularly strong support among Catholic voters in the south. The SPD saw more success in northern and central states, producing the kind of divided map you would expect for such a relatively close race for first position. The Free Democratic Party also continued to receive greater support in the north, while the National Democratic Party performed better in the south. For the first time, the Social Democrats won a majority of constituency seats; had the election been held under the First Past the Post electoral system, the party would have secured an outright majority.

The Social Democrats made particular gains among middle-class, white collar workers, more than doubling its share of the vote among this group since beginning of the decade, at the expense of the Union parties. The Social Democrats made notable gains among civil servants and unskilled workers, while maintaining its traditional lead among skilled workers. The Union Parties once again won a majority of votes from farmers but their level of support fell from 73% in 1965 to just 59% in 1969, much of which went to the National Democratic Party. Women also voted for the Social Democrats in increased numbers, as did younger voters and even, to a lesser degree, Catholic voters.

The election also saw West Berlin elect 22 non-voting delegates to the Bundestag, appointed indirectly by the city’s legislature. They were able to give voice to the divided city’s interests but did not have any effect on the federal balance of power.  As the Social Democratic Party had won a decisive majority in the legislature two years previously, 13 of West Berlin’s 22 delegates were Social Democrats; a further 8 were members of the CDU, while the Free Democratic Party had 1 non-voting delegate. If these delegates had been granted voting rights, the balance of power in the Bundestag would not have been significantly altered.

Aftermath

As in several previous elections, the result in 1969 placed the Free Democratic Party in a kingmaker position. Finding himself the leader of the largest grouping, albeit slightly weakened, Kiesinger could have expected to continue as Chancellor, either by re-establishing the grand coalition with the Social Democrats or returning to coalition with the Free Democratic Party. Yet, emboldened by another record result, Brandt opted to attempt to form his own government. He found in the Free Democrats a willing partner, itself having moved markedly to the left under Scheel’s leadership. A coalition between the two parties - known in Germany as a ‘social-liberal coalition’ – was formed remarkably quickly.  On 22 October 1969, Brandt was sworn in as West Germany’s fourth chancellor, becoming Germany’s first Chancellor from the Social Democratic Party in nearly 40 years, although three members of the Free Democratic Party abstained during the investiture vote. The Union parties entered opposition for the first time.

No longer dependent on the CSU, Brandt was able to implement his policy of revaluing the Deutsche Mark. This contributed to an economic recovery during his first term in which the average poverty rate fell and inflation remained low. His government accelerated the expansion of West Germany’s welfare state, earning Brandt the popular title, ‘Chancellor of domestic reform.’ The Bundestag passed a series workers’ rights policies, increasing maternity leave, improving support for sickness and injuries and introducing noise protections. Pension reform guaranteed a minimum income for all pensioners and established a minimum pension value. Children were included within the country’s accident insurance scheme and benefited from free medical checkups, while free hospital care was introduced for recipients of social relief. West Germany’s education budget increased threefold and social spending reached a third of the federal budget.

The government also brought in a slate of environmental policies: the maximum lead content in petrol was reduced, the insecticide DDT was banned, and regulations to control airport noise were brought in. Brandt gave particular focus to introducing social reforms, which included a reduction in the voting age from 21 to 18, equal rights for children born out of wedlock – Brandt himself was the child of an illegitimate relationship – ending the prohibition on landlords renting rooms to unmarried couples, a ban on corporal punishment in schools and some safeguards against the abuse of animals. The pace of social democratic reforms was somewhat constrained by the Free Democrats, who contained a larger socially conservative wing than the Social Democrats.

The Brandt government, in cooperation with state governments, also passed the Radicals Decree in early 1972, which banned any members of organisations designated as extremists from working in the civil service. This was produced primarily to combat the Red Army Faction, an East German-funded Marxist militant group founded in 1970 that viewed West Germany as an illegitimate state and which remained fascist in essence.

However, Brandt’s most controversial policy area, and the one that would most define his legacy, concerned foreign policy. Brandt promoted a policy known as ‘Neue Ostpolitik,’ or ‘new eastern policy’ focused on expanding cooperation with Eastern Bloc countries and aiming to reduce tensions. Under the ‘Hallstein Doctrine,’ named after Walter Hallstein, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office during the 1950s, West Germany had refused to establish relations with East Germany and broke off relations with any state that did so, with the exception of the Soviet Union. In contrast, Brandt had long been an advocate of collaboration between the two German states, arguing that trade and engagement were more likely to weaken the communist hold on power in the East than continued confrontation.

For Brandt, alongside other politicians that had grown up through West Berlin, it was apparent that West Germany’s NATO allies would not prioritise ending the division of Europe at the risk of war; American and western European passivity to the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 merely seemed to confirm that assessment. Moreover, the United States and Soviet Union were entering into a period of détente and a cooling of Cold War tensions in which opportunities for diplomacy appeared to be expanding.

As Chancellor, and supported by his Free Democrat foreign minister, Walter Scheel, Brandt signed the 1970 Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Union in which West Germany formally abandoned claims to territories east of the Oder-Neisse line that had been stripped from Germany at the end of the war. That was followed by the Treaty of Warsaw, which saw West Germany recognise the People’s Republic of Poland and its territorial integrity. The borders of postwar Germany were a sensitive political issue, particularly for over 10 million Vertriebene, ethnic Germans expelled from eastern territories no longer part of either German state, who sought the right to return to those territories and constituted a sizable voter block. After signing the Treaty of Moscow, Brandt commented: ‘with this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been gambled away.’

Ostpolitik finally reached East Germany in 1972 with the signing of the Basic Treaty that established relations between the two states, more than two decades after their establishment. Brandt had already become the first West German leader to visit East Germany in 1970 and had previously negotiated the Transit Agreement of 1971, which enabled some limited movement between citizens of East and West Germany. During his 1970 visit to Poland, Brandt provided the most iconic image of his Ostpolitik policy when he fell to his knees in front of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a gesture of national repentance for the Holocaust which came to be known as the ‘Kniefall.’

For these efforts, Willy Brandt was named the Time Person of the Year in 1970 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Much of Brandt’s Ostpolitik was opposed by the Union parties in opposition and also resulted in multiple MPs defecting from the ruling coalition in protest. To his critics, Brandt was appeasing a hostile and illegitimate state while accepting Germany’s permanent division. By mid-1972, the government had lost its majority, and West Germany held its first ever snap elections, which saw the coalition increase its majority – and the Social Democratic Party emerge for the first time as the largest political bloc. Brandt governed for a further two years until one of his closest aids was revealed to be an agent of the East German secret service, forcing his resignation after five years in power.

The 1969 West German federal election marked a key moment in German postwar political history. Although the result was not especially dramatic in its own terms, it further strengthened the Social Democratic Party’s political position and enabled it to form Germany’s first social-democratic government since the late Weimar period, 40 years previously. This was also the first time that the position of Chancellor had transferred democratically from one party to another since 1928. Brandt’s policy of Ostpolitik – aiming to overcome tensions in the east through diplomacy and trade - continued to influence German politics in subsequent decades. In recent times, this diplomatic approach has come under renewed debate with regard to Germany’s policy towards Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Nor was 1969 the only election Beate Klarsfeld ever contested. She remained an activist and Nazi-hunter in the subsequent decades, including a campaign against Kurt Waldheim’s ultimately successful bid to become President of Austria. In 2012, 40 years after her first electoral contest against Kiesinger, Klarsfeld was nominated as the left-wing Die Linke party’s candidate for the indirectly-elected German presidency, when she received 10% of the vote from lawmakers.

Reading List:

Fulbrook, Mary, A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation (John Wiley and Sons, 2014).

Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Vintage, 2010).

Klingemann, Hans D. & Urban Pappi, Franz, ‘The 1969 Bundestag Election in the Federal Republic of Germany: An Analysis of Voting Behaviour,’ Comparative Politics 2.4 (July 1970), pp. 523-548.

Morgan, Roger, ‘The 1969 Election in West Germany,’ The World Today 25.11 (Nov. 1969), pp. 470-8.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historyofelections.substack.com

The 1822-3 United States House of Representatives election has hardly been remembered as the most exciting election in the country’s history. However, it represented an important moment in the transition between the first and second US party systems at the tail-end of the ‘Era of Good Feelings,’ and the representatives elected in these years would assume unexpected importance as kingmakers in the 1824 presidential election.

Transcript:

Mid-1822.  Brazil formally declared independence from Portugal, which would itself in September adopt its first constitution; Greece won a number of victories on land and at sea in its independence war against the Ottoman Empire; King George IV became the first British King to visit Scotland for 171 years; Jean-François Champollion announced his success in using the Rosetta Stone to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; Charles Babbage published a proposal for creating a ‘difference engine,’ a predecessor to modern computers; and voters in the United States of America began the year-long process of electing the next House of Representatives.

Despite the wishes of several of the United States’ founding fathers, it did not take long for political partisanship to enter the new constitutional structures established after the American Revolution.  From the very beginning the House of Representatives divided itself into pro- and anti-administration groupings, which by the middle of the 1790s began to coalesce into more formal political factions. 

The Democratic-Republican Party – no direct relation to either the modern Democratic or Republican Party, although often known contemporaneously as simply the Republican Party – was initially led by Thomas Jefferson and grew out of the opposition to inaugural president George Washington.  The Democratic-Republicans advocated a decentralised form of agrarian democracy held up by ongoing western expansion. In opposition to the Democratic-Republicans was the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton (of hit musical fame), which campaigned for a centralised banking system and closer relations with former colonial power Great Britain.  With most support in the north-east, the Federalist Party tended towards a more anti-slavery position than their Democratic-Republican opponents.

During the United States’ first decades these two factions traded control of the Presidency, House of Representatives and the Senate – the legislature’s upper house.   However, after Thomas Jefferson’s election victory in 1800, defeating incumbent Federalist President John Adams, the Federalist Party entered into a period of sustained decline.  The Federalist Party would never win another election from this point onward, and while its decline was not a linear downward slope – it enjoyed brief recoveries in the 1808-09 and 1812-13 House elections – the party remained a marginalised opposition force for the rest of its existence, holding on to power only in its Massachusetts base.  It contested its last presidential election in 1816 and allowed Democratic-Republican President James Monroe to win re-election effectively unopposed in 1820.

This period of political dominance by the Democratic-Republican Party, only strengthened after the War of 1812 against Britain, has become known as the ‘Era of Good Feelings.’  The Federalist Party became further discredited in public opinion across much of the US for its opposition to the war.  James Monroe’s presidency between 1817 and 1825 was also marked by attempts to bridge the past partisan divides and promote national unity, although he refused appeals to appoint Federalist members to his cabinet.  Monroe openly called for an end to partisan politics, including his own party, and so actively strove to weaken the Federalist Party’s remaining areas of influence. 

However it would be naïve to view this ‘Era of Good Feelings’ as devoid of political conflict: questions over the extent of federal government power, an economic crisis in 1819 precipitated by a collapse in cotton prices and the expansion of slavery in new western states all continued to draw out political divisions.  The latter issue in particular, brought to the fore by the question of Missouri’s admission to the union, exacerbated sectional conflict between the north and south, a warning sign of the republic’s key faultline that would result in civil war 40 years later.  The question was temporarily resolved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which maintained an equal balance between free and slave states and drew a horizontal line down the western frontier to divide future states between those permitted to practice slavery and those required to be kept free.

Former President Thomas Jefferson accused the Federalist Party of using the issue of slavery as a means of dividing the Democratic-Republican Party, but the division remained more strongly between northern and southern politicians than between the two parties.  This coincided with a general demographic and political loss of power for southern states, which had played a dominant role in US politics from independence; by 1820 New York had surpassed Virginia as the state with the largest population.  As the ‘Era of Good Feelings’ culminated in the early 1820s, these political cleavages therefore remained distinctly non-partisan, as the midterm elections to the House of Representatives in 1822 and 1823 demonstrated. 

The elections took place across a period of over 13 months, with each state determining its own electoral calendar.  Louisiana went first, electing its three representatives in July 1822, while voters in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina had to wait until August 1823, with all other states falling inbetween.  Six states would not even hold their elections until after the beginning of the congressional term in March 1823.

The 1822-23 election was also the first to be held after the 1820 census, which led to a substantial increase in the House of Representatives’ size, growing from 187 members to 213, an increase of 26, much of which came from the western states.  Northern states also benefitted, New York alone gaining an additional 7 representatives.  The new state of Missouri also participated in an election for the first time since its admission to the union the previous year, electing one member of the House.

While less autocratic than many of its European counterparts, United States could not be described as a fully democratic state in the early 19th century.  The majority of residents did not have the right to vote, most notably women and enslaved people.  Specific suffrage rules were decided state by state and, although there had been some expansion to the franchise since American independence, by 1822 many states still based voter eligibility on property or taxation requirements.

This focus on wealth or property meant that upon independence a small number of free African American men held the right to vote, although an increasing number of states began introducing explicit racial as well as gender bars on the right to vote by the beginning of the 19th century.  As Native Americans were considered citizens of their tribes rather than the United States, none had the right to vote in US elections in this period.  In this regard the United States fell behind many of the newly-independent Latin American states, which were less inclined to implement racialised voting restrictions.

The result was entirely unsurprising: another landslide victory for the Democratic-Republicans, who secured their twelfth successive majority in the House of Representatives, picking up 34 additional seats to win 189 in total.  The Federalists dropped by eight seats, falling to 24, or just over ten percent of the chamber.  The Democratic-Republicans gained additional seats across the entire country and asserted particular control over the new western seats, winning every district west of North Carolina.  Federalist support, such as it was, remained confined to isolated pockets concentrated in the north-eastern states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. 

Though unsurprising, the scale of the Federalist defeat was nevertheless remarkable.  With almost 90% control over the House of Representatives, the Democratic-Republican Party enjoyed a political dominance unprecedented for any party or faction at any other point in American history.  The party’s net gain of 34 seats remains a record for any governing party during a midterm election.  The Democratic-Republican leader in the House, Henry Clay, was easily elected as the House Speaker, a position he had previously held on two past occasions.

1822-3 was also the last midterm election held during a President’s sixth year in office before the advent of a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as the ‘six-year itch.’  From 1834, the President’s sixth-year midterms consistently produced a net loss of seats in the House for the governing party, a trend subsequently only broken once in 1998, when Bill Clinton was able to avoid a midterm setback in his sixth year as President. 

This trend was repeated in the Senate, at this time elected indirectly by state legislatures.  The chamber had grown from 46 seats to 48 with the addition of two senators from Missouri.  As in the House, this addition benefitted the Democratic-Republicans, who grew their delegation from 38 seats in 1821 to 44 seats by the end of the electoral cycle in 1823.  The Federalists were reduced to just three Senators, all from the north-east.  Among the incoming Democratic-Republican Senators was Andrew Jackson, a renowned general who had previously held Tennessee’s Senate seat for a brief period in the late 18th century and who intended to use the federal office as a springboard to campaign for the presidency.

The Federalist Party would never contest another election at the federal level, although neither would the party immediately die.  It remained active in Delaware and Massachusetts politics, periodically controlling legislative chambers in the two states and successfully electing one of its members as Boston mayor in 1829.  Nevertheless, the Federalist Party, once the party of government in the United States, became increasingly irrelevant and would formally disband in 1835, most of its remaining members joining the newly-formed Whig Party.

In addition to witnessing this historic political dominance by the Democratic-Republicans, the Congress elected in 1822 and 1823 would come to have unexpected political significance for the United States.  It was the Congress which received President Monroe’s state of the union address in 1823 outlining the United States’ opposition to efforts by European powers to regain influence in the Western hemisphere, having given diplomatic recognition to the newly independent Latin American states.  This major tenet of American foreign policy in the coming century would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. 

More directly, the House of Representatives would end up playing a key role in the 1824 presidential election.  With the Federalist Party in a state of disintegration, competition in this election came entirely from within the Democratic-Republican Party.  For the first time more than two major candidates contested the election, with four candidates running credible campaigns.  They included John Quincy Adams, son of former Federalist Party president John Adams and incumbent Secretary of State; Andrew Jackson, Senator and renowned general; Henry Clay, incumbent Speaker of the House; and William Crawford, incumbent Treasury Secretary.

As a result of this multi-cornered contest, no candidate won a majority of the popular vote or, more importantly, the electoral college.  Andrew Jackson emerged with a plurality of both but with just 99 electoral college votes fell short of the 131 required for a majority, only slightly ahead of his main competitor John Quincy Adams, who won 84 electoral college votes.

In the event that no candidate could secure an electoral college majority, the US constitution mandates the House of Representatives to hold a contingent election among the three highest-ranking candidates to choose the next President, while the Senate votes to elect the Vice-President.  A contingent election had previously taken place in 1801 as a result of an electoral college tie.  In an additional constitutional quirk, the House does not vote in contingent elections using a simple majority system but instead through state delegations voting en bloc, thereby equalising the voting power of each state.

The contingent election was held in February 1825, one of the final acts of the House delegation elected in 1822 and 1823.  Representatives chose between Jackson, Adams and Crawford, Clay having been eliminated after finishing in fourth place.  Clay strongly encouraged his supporters to back Adams and as incumbent Speaker made use of his institutional knowledge of the House, helping to swing the vote away from Jackson.  As a result, Adams received 13 votes on the first ballot, against seven for Jackson and four for Crawford, a majority of one state delegation. 

Notably, Adams picked up significant support in the north-eastern states and in New England, former Federalist strongholds which had ensured victory for his father 28 years earlier.  He also gained votes from representatives in the west, including states like Kentucky where he hadn’t even appeared on the ballot during the popular vote, thanks to support from Clay and his backers.

John Quincy Adams was thereby elected President as a result of his support in the House of Representatives.  Vice-Presidential candidate John Calhoun, incumbent Secretary of War, had been backed by both Adams and Jackson and so easily gained an electoral college majority, preventing the need for a contingent election in the Senate.

The House’s decision briefly threatened to trigger civil conflict.  Jackson condemned the ‘corrupt bargain’ between Adams and Clay and could have utilised his support from militias and within the military to force his position, although he ultimately made a more populist appeal to ‘the people’ to ‘correct any outrage upon political purity by Congress,’ lest they become ‘the slaves of Congress and its political corruption.’  However, there were no significant protests or revolts against the House’s decision, and Jackson soon focused his attention onto the next presidential election scheduled for 1828.

1824 would be the second of three contingent elections conducted in US history, the third taking place in 1837 to determine the Vice-President.  1824 is also to date the only presidential election in which the candidate who won the most electoral college votes did not become President.  Andrew Jackson’s bitterness at his defeat in the House of Representatives and determination to continue his political campaign would split the Democratic-Republican Party, forming the contours of a new emerging party system divided between Jackson’s supporters and opponents, ultimately propelling him to the presidency four years later.

Hardly remembered as a standout election in US history, the 1822-3 congressional midterms were perhaps surprisingly significant.  The final election of the increasingly non-partisan ‘Era of Good Feelings,’ voters granted the Democratic-Republican Party the largest federal landslide for any party or faction in American history.  The House of Representatives elected throughout these 14 months then developed extraordinary influence during the 1824 presidential election, assuming a kingmaker role for the second and to date final time.  Its decision to deprive Jackson of the presidency would have drastic results for the republic’s future political development. 

The elections of 1822-3 can be seen then as part of a bridge between what historians have identified as two separate party systems.  They comprised one of the final federal elections of the first party systems while contributing to the birth of the second party system, which would last until the years preceding the American Civil War in the 1850s.

And the Speaker elected to preside over the House of Representatives in 1823, Henry Clay, would continue to have a full and varied political career.  After losing out on the presidency in 1824 he served four years as John Quincy Adams’ Secretary of State – the ‘corrupt bargain,’ as Andrew Jackson famously and influentially described.  He then returned to the Senate, representing Kentucky between 1831 and 1842 before contesting a second presidential election in 1844, once again losing out on the top position, this time to James Polk.  Clay would then return to the Senate yet again for a final stint from 1849 until his death in 1852, playing a key role in political compromises surrounding slavery, rounding off a career in which Speaker of the House formed just one of many political accomplishments.

Reading list

Foner, Eric, Give Me Liberty! An American History (New York, 2014).

Kensmind, ‘Mid-Term Elections: 1822,’ Presidential History Geeks (21 January 2022), accessed on 27 December 2022 at https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/1403047.html. 

Nester, William, Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815-1848: the Art of American Power During the Early Republic (Sterling, 2013).

Music: Immerse by Monument_Music, licenced under Pixabay Content Licence.

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