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The Social Democratic-led government called elections on 19 January 1919 for a National Assembly that would give Germany a new constitution. On 11 August 1919, the democratic Weimar Constitution was promulgated. It provided for a Reich president whose powers were similar to those of the former emperor as limited by the October constitutional ...
On 28 October, the Reichstag passed constitutional reforms that changed Germany into a parliamentary monarchy. The chancellor and his ministers were made dependent on the confidence of the parliamentary majority rather than the emperor, and peace treaties and declarations of war required the Reichstag's approval. [36]
The leadership of the largest party in the Reichstag, the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and especially its chairman Friedrich Ebert, saw the party's main goal as already having been achieved by the constitutional reforms and believed that the Empire's elites would come to terms with democratisation if Germany remained a monarchy. [4]
The leadership of the MSPD had seen its long-standing demands for a democratization of the Reich addressed by the October 1918 constitutional reforms. [2] The amendment to Constitution of the German Empire turned the German Reich into a parliamentary monarchy in which the government was no longer answerable to the emperor but to the majority in the Reichstag.
The term "constitution" (Verfassung) was avoided as the drafters regarded the Grundgesetz as an interim arrangement for a provisional West German state, expecting that an eventual reunified Germany would adopt a proper constitution, enacted under the provisions of Article 146 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that such a constitution must be ...
The North German Confederation was a different entity from the German Confederation, but it can also be regarded as the brainchild of a long lasting reform debate within the German Confederation. The new Bundesrat even referred to the old diet in Article 6, when it redistributed the votes for each states.
In his opening speech on 19 May 1848, Gagern defined the main tasks of the national assembly as the creation of a "constitution for Germany" and the achievement of German unification. This was followed by a total of 230 sessions, supported by 26 committees and five commissions, in the course of which the deputies developed the Frankfurt ...
The Reichstag (German: [ˈʁaɪçstaːk] ⓘ) of the German Empire was Germany's lower House of Parliament from 1871 to 1918. Within the governmental structure of the Reich, it represented the national and democratic element alongside the federalism of the Bundesrat and the monarchic and bureaucratic element of the executive, embodied in the Reich chancellor. [1]