The PDS and the Concept of the Catch-all Party
in German Politics and Society
In the years since unification, Germany’s political parties have faced
a number of formidable challenges. They range from incorporating
the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal
Republic’s political processes, reassessing Germany’s role in the
wider world, overcoming gridlock on many pressing policy questions
at home (perhaps best understood as the overcoming of the Reformstau),
to finding a way out of Germany’s much maligned economic
malaise.1 Such challenges have had a not inconsiderable effect on the
German party system, the end product of which has been that this
system, once a bastion of cast-iron stability, has become characterized
by diversity and genuine electoral competition in a way that it has
not been since the late 1950s. Therefore, the electoral position of the
much-vaunted Volksparteien, if perhaps not their control of the political
process, has slipped considerably.
