respectably in the first FRG elections of 1949, receiving 29.2 percent of the vote and the support of 6,935,000 voters (424,000 less than the CDU/CSU). But by the mid-fifties, with West Germany firmly tied into the Western Alliance and the incipient project of European union, and with the Socialists’ doom-laden economic prophecies demonstrably falsified, the SPD was stymied. In the elections of 1953 and 1957 the Socialist vote increased only slightly and their share of the electorate stagnated. Only in 1959, seven years after Schumacher’s premature death, did a new generation of German
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