German Conservative Party
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German Conservative Party
Deutschkonservative Partei |
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|---|---|
| Founded | June 7, 1876 |
| Dissolved | November 1918 |
| Preceded by | Prussian Conservative Party |
| Merged into | German National People's Party |
| Headquarters | Berlin, Germany |
| Newspaper | Kreuzzeitung |
| Ideology | Conservatism (Germany) |
| Political position | Right-wing |
The German Conservative Party (German: Deutschkonservative Partei, DKP) was a right-wing political party of the German Empire, founded in 1876. It largely represented the wealthy landowning elite Prussian Junkers. The party was a response to German unification, universal and equal franchise in national elections, and rapid industrialization. It changed from a diffuse party of broad ideology into an interest party in Bismarckian Germany. In the early 1870s, Bismarck formed his majority with the base in the National Liberal party, which emphasized free trade and anti-Catholicism. He broke with them in the late 1870s, by which time the Free Conservative Party and the German Conservative Party had brought together the landed Junkers in the East, and the rapidly growing industrial leadership in the major cities. They now became the main base of Bismarck's support, and successive chancellors down to 1918.
According to Robert M. Berdahl, this redirection illustrated "the slow and painful process by which the landed aristocracy adjusted to its new position in the capitalist 'class' system that had come to replace the precapitalist 'Estate' structure of Prussian society."
It was generally seen as representing the interests of the German nobility, the Junker landowners living east of the Elbe, and the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union, and had its political stronghold in the Prussian Diet, where the three-class franchise gave rural elites disproportionate power. Predominantly Prussian traditionalists, the party members had been skeptical at first about the 1871 Unification of Germany — unlike the Free Conservative Party, a national conservative split-off dominated by business magnates unrestrictedly supporting the policies of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
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