The both the Soviets and the party elite of the SED intended the GDR to be a single-party state from its inception. The groundwork for the SED control over the government was laid in the early postwar years of occupation. Although the Soviet occupation authority (SVAG) allowed reestablishment of four political parties- the Communist Party (KPD), Socialist Party (SPD), the liberal democrats (LDP), Christian Democrats (CDU)- in June 1945, SVAG clearly favored the KPD. SVAG commander Zhukov in an August 1945 meeting with his officers explained this rationale behind allowing this bloc of left to center right political parties to operate inside Germany:

I am not at all in agreement with the idea that we should maintain an identical and equal relationship towards all parties of the bloc. We should comprehensively support one party [KPD] and enable it to increase its authority, while we should keep up the others with the aim of neutralising those strata of the population who support the two liberal bourgeois parties.

The formation of the SED by amalgamating the eastern zone's SPD and KPD was part of the process of control and regulation. SVAG officers were upset over the independent course the SPD was taking in the western zone and thought that by putting the KPD leadership in charge, they would instill party discipline.

A similar process emerged with the eastern zone's LDP and CDU. These were to be explicitly minority parties who would incorporate social groups that did not easily fit into the SED's paradigm of being a peasant and proletarian party. The SED countenanced the existence of these parties because they served both Cold War politics and GDR domestic interests. Having a relatively pliant liberal and christian party allowed the GDR to try and claim the moral high ground against their FRG counterparts- for example, the GDR's CDU paladins would argue that the legacy of German theology found full expression in the GDR, not the capitalist FRG. The formation of the National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDPD) represented an even more instrumentalization of the party process in the GDR. The NDPD was launched with great fanfare in 1948 as a counter to the threat of western rearmament and was a party composed of former Wehrmacht veterans opposed to the Cold War and FRG rearmament. The SED's trumpeting of the NDPD as a sign that the GDR was a bastion of an antimilitarist and reformed Germany came in 1955 with the return of Friedrich Paulus to the GDR and the January 1955 First All-German Conference of Officers. SED head Ulbricht had hoped that a figure of Paulus's stature would counteract the growing popularity of Erich von Manstein, whose bestselling revisionist book Lost Victories celebrated both the Wehrmacht's brilliance and its apolitical nature. The Conference invited German veterans from both Germanies to participate, but its overarching goal was to denounce German armies fighting under a foreign flag (now the US-led NATO) and castigate the actions of the FRG as creating the conditions for a permanent German division.

Within this context it was clear that the SED and its Soviet partners saw the democratic process was too important to be left to chances. Elections in the GDR, like other parts of the Eastern bloc, became "elections without choice" in which voters had to publicly approve a predecided Einheitsliste list of candidates. The unicameral legislature, the Volkskammer, had very little actual power over the GDR despite provisions within the constitution that in theory granted it great powers. The state used elections as a means for the GDR citizens to prove their loyalty to the state. The GDR, like the rest of the Eastern bloc, took great pains to ensure that electoral turnout was far higher than that achieved in the West. Election time was a period in which the state prided itself on achieving its production goals and other propagandistic signs that the GDR had achieved the peasant and worker's state.

While GDR elections in many cases paralleled developments in both the USSR and other states of the Warsaw Pact, memories of the war and National Socialism added a further element of distrust to the SED leadership's mistrust of its population. The SED authorized the MfS's system of observation and domestic spying initially to root out any unrepentant remnants of the NSDAP among the population. What this MfS's network of informers discovered was not a vast underground of former NSDAP members ready to revolt, but widespread grumbling about SED corruption and incompetence. MfS spying revealed that despite its calls for unity, the SED's stranglehold on political power was fundamentally unpopular among broad swaths of the German population. This helped to further push the SED to treat public ceremonies as an opportunity for citizens to profess their loyalty to the state.

This leaves the question of how "regular" GDR citizens reacted to the emergence of the SED state. There were some who certaily voted with their feet and fled the GDR, which was the rationale behind creating the Berlin Wall in 1963. But the vast majority of the GDR's population had to adjust to the reality of the SED's political monopoly. One stratagem they used was to try and use the state's rhetoric against itself by direct petitioning of the state to resolve issues and problems. Election times became an opportunity for the population to petition GDR elites directly with Wähleraufträge for internal improvements or redressing shortcomings of the planned economy. Some locales honed this petitioning strategy during Honecker's "Join In" campaign that sought to stress Heimat and local particularism as a sign that the GDR was preserving German Kultur, unlike the FRG. Local Heimat activists would use the state's commitment to cultural preservation to get much needed funding for local projects.

Yet there was a limit to the results that petitioning or engaging with the state could achieve. The state's various festivities and celebration of its own democratic culture rang hollow as the discrepancy between reality and rhetoric became more apparent. Forced participation in these mass events further sharpened cynicism as the state rewarded apathetic acceptance SED control but seldom provided genuine believers actual outlets for political power unless they possessed preexisting connections inside the SED. The contradictions of the GDR's political culture became more apparent as the state floundered in the 1980s when the planned economy failed as Soviet subsidies dried up. The SED thus found itself something of a spent force in 1989, with little domestic support despite the popularity of some of its ideology among the GDR populace, and hamstrung by an economic and political crisis that limited its options.

Sources

Fulbrook, Mary. The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Jessen, Ralph, and Hedwig Richter. Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011.

Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.

Palmowski, Jan. Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Slaveski, Filip. The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.