Project Outline: “Constitution and Development of Political Parties in Germany from 1989/90 to the present”

The KGParl lead joint network: “Parties and Party System after 1990” is investigating the constitution and the transformation of a new German party landscape after the reunification of 1990. The first focus is on the establishment of party political structures in the five new German states after the system transformation in 1989 and the unification in October 1990. It is trying to analyze the different expectations in East and West Germany and the competing influence of the established West German parties, which extended their organizations into the territory of the former GDR, in building what soon was seen as an “East German party system”. Also, the effects and repercussions of these processes in eastern Germany on the all-German party system will be examined: Was there a sort of co-transformation occur in western Germany? Did the reunification perhaps even accelerate the fragmentation of the “old” federal German party system that has been evident since 1983, when a new, young party, the Greens, succeeded in entering the German Bundestag for the first time?