Background
The grassroots democracy movement that forced the dismissal of East German head of state Erich Honecker in 1989 also empowered a younger generation of reform politicians in East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party who looked to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika as their model for political change. Reformers like authors Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf and attorney Gregor Gysi, lawyer of dissidents like Robert Havemann and Rudolf Bahro, soon began to re-invent a party infamous for its rigid Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and police-state methods.
By the end of 1989, the last hardline members of the party's Central Committee had either resigned or been pushed out, followed in 1990 by 95% of the SED's 2.3 million members. A new name, "Party of Democratic Socialism", was adopted to distance the reformed party from its communist past (after a brief transitional period as the SED/PDS). By early 1990, the PDS was no longer a Marxist-Leninist party, though neo-marxist and communist minority factions continue to exist.
The PDS faced the voters for the first time in the 1990 East German elections--the first (and as it turned out, only) free elections ever held in East Germany. The party was roundly defeated, winning only 88 seats in the 400-seat Volkskammer, finishing a distant third behind the East German wings of the West German CDU and SPD.
Read more about this topic: Party Of Democratic Socialism (Germany)
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