"All Marxist Paths Lead to Moscow": Election Poster for the Christian Democratic Union (1953)

For strategic reasons, Adenauer's CDU ran an election campaign that linked the anti-Communist SPD to Communism by alluding to its Marxist tradition. The move was questionable not only because it represented a propagandistic exploitation of the widespread fear of "Bolshevism" in Germany for partisan purposes, but also because it undermined the democratic parties' anti-totalitarian consensus by defaming the SPD. Granted, by attacking the increasingly popular social market economy and Western integration the SPD had made it easy for its political opponents to describe it as incapable of governing. It was only after the party declared its support for the social market economy and Western integration in the Godesberg Program of 1959 that the SPD was able to develop into a mass party and then into a governing one as well.

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