The death of President Ebert in 1925 resulted in a new election being called in which seven candidates took part. The right parties had put up a joint candidate, Doctor Jarres the Burgomaster of Duisburg, who won the first ballot. Next to him came the Social Democrat, Otto Braun (the then Prime Minister of Prussia), who had received the second largest vote. He had every chance of gaining the additional three million votes to win outright. Yet out of the blue the Social Democrats decided to withdraw their candidate in support of the Catholic Centre Party’s Doctor Wilhelm Marx. He had headed a government in early 1924 which introduced severe deflationary measures against the working class and ruled by emergency decree. Far from being a front runner, Wilhelm Marx had only received half as many votes as Braun!

In the final ballot the right had also changed their candidate to Field Marshall von Hindenburg (advertised as “the Saviour”). The Social Democrats had justified their support for the reactionary Dr Marx as a policy of the “lesser evil”. This shallow policy was to have dire consequences for the German working class. The Communist Party put up Ernst Thälmann as their candidate. By a very small margin, the militarist Hindenburg was elected President of the Republic.

A further consequence of the economic revival was the demand by the old Hohenzollern monarchy for compensation for the 1918 revolution! This had been raised to one degree or another over the previous five years, so the SPD and KPD agreed to join forces to end this scandal once and for all through a referendum. They campaigned boldly for the complete expropriation of the property of the old nobility, no compensation, and the establishment of a fund for war invalids, old age pensioners and the unemployed out of these proceeds. The campaign was one of the most successful ever mounted by the workers’ parties. Despite not achieving an overwhelming majority, the combined left forces won 14.5 million votes, which compared extremely favourably to the 10.5 million they had both recorded in the December 1924 general election. It was the most successful joint action since the Kapp putsch of 1920.

The period 1925 to 1929 were years of maximum stability for the Weimar Republic. Unemployment had fallen to 65,000 by 1928, and retail sales were up 20 percent over their 1925 level. Prosperity began to return to Germany.