Landtag Electoral Reform

Abstract

The three million Socialist ballots cast in the national election of June 1903 — to the dismay of the cartel of Conservatives, Agrarians, Anti-Semites and National Liberals — provoked second thoughts on the three-class franchise in Saxony. Without waiting for the Landtag elections to take place in the fall, the government began to sound out informed opinion on the necessity for electoral reform. Stresemann’s Verband, founded the previous year, was not consulted. Just the same, the new business lobby lost no time in sending the government a memorandum bristling with population and tax statistics to prove gross over-representation of the rural districts in the Second Chamber. Then at a full convention of the Saxon National Liberal Party in September, a reluctant leadership accepted an anticartel platform which contained the reform planks advocated by dissident party factions since 1896 and now by the Verband. These were redistricting and plural balloting to replace malapportionment and the three-class franchise in the “Red Kingdom.”