Shafaq Yaqoob
How far did the Weimar Republic under Stresemann solve the problems it faced within Germany 1924- 1924?
Right after the Weimar Republic was set up; it faced from a lot of political opposition from the right and left wing parties and had to deal with the economic crisis of 1923, which greatly weakened Ebert’s government. However it can be said the Stresemann coming into power was successful in bringing a degree of economic recovery and political stability. He was the most successful in the area of foreign policies, which allowed him to alter the harsher clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Yet not all problems were solved, as politically, although many parties were willing to work together to support the new democratic system, there were many short- lived coalition government which found it difficult to work together and this resulted in extremist parties gaining more support. Although Stresemann was able to solve many problems and please many Germans, however he was not able to bring complete stability in Germany and many problems remained.
Germany recovered politically as in 1928, the Social Democrats, the largest party joined a coalition with many other political parties which was successful as all the parties were willing to support the democratic Weimar Republic. Since 1923, this was the first successful coalition government of Germany. This showed that the middle-class were no longer suspicious of the socialists. Not only a strong democratic coalition government was established, most of the extremist parties like the Nazis did not gain much attention as in the 1928 election Nazis only won 3% of the votes. However, despite these improvements which allowed Germany to have a much more stable government, many problems still remained. During the course of these years most of the elections were won by the Social Democrats. Although this was a great achievement for the Social Democrats but it was also a major setback. Due to Proportional Representation the socialist did not gain enough seats in the Reichstag to run the government on their own, so there had to coalition between political parties. However, the problem was that the coalitions did not last long as the parties were not fully committed to the democratic system and had their own intentions for Germany. The parties could not easily agree on policies and decisions were slow. If they could not agree, elections were held for the new government to take over. During 14 years there were 25 different governments which only lasted a few weeks. Furthermore, in the 1925 election Hindenburg was elected as the president. Hindenburg was one of the most prominent critics of the Weimar Republic and was also one of the war leaders during the Kaiser’s reign in the First World War. This showed that there were many people in Germany who did not support the democracy and wanted Germany to be ruled by a strong leader under a dictatorship. Perhaps, Stresemann was more successful in solving Germany’s economic problems.
