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Notes -
Offtopic:
“Elections” in the GDR are very strange as they weren’t even sham elections. We imagine the failure mode of a democratic banana republic were a tyrant/regime keeps power through election fraud or controlled opposition, but in communist countries there was/is no opposition.
Instead communist Germany had a “unity list” as an election ballot which looked like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Stimmzettel_Volkskammerwahl_1950_%28M_143%29.jpg
You notice the fundamental element missing: any kind of choice. There is not even a field for yes/no!
You could technically disagree, but for that you had to strike out the whole list with a pen. You could do that in secret by going into the polling booth, but of course using the booth makes you suspicious as everyone else just folded the ballot and put it directly into the ballot box. That is how you get 99% election results.
Nominally only a quarter of the “parliament” were candidates from the ruling SED, the other pre-selected members were from “democratic parties” and mass organizations to fake a multiparty system. But parliaments role was simply to confirm unanimously the decisions of the SED central committee.
My understanding is that this was the usual role of parliament in socialist/communist countries, though I don’t know how this worked in practice with speeches and committee work. Surely there were some contrarians slipping through the system? In communist China there are wisely no elections (I think it disillusioned Eastern Germans more that their elections were visibly pointless busy work), but the Chinese People Congress is similarly staffed with two thirds CCP members and one third by members of “eight allowed minor democratic parties“.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_parties_(China)
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