ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what happens to a party system in the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic state. The crumbling of the strongly entrenched Honecker regime in 1989 came as a complete surprise to nearly all observers. Honecker obstinately maintained his hard-line course, even when from late 1988 to late 1989 thousands of members resigned from the party and when, according to one late 1988 poll, 90 percent of the SED's youth members supported Gorbachev's reforms. The unraveling of the regime came a few months later. When the Hungarian reform communist government opened its frontiers to Austria on September 11, 1989, thousands of German Democratic Republic (GDR) citizens headed for West Germany via Hungary and Austria. On October 7, 1989, after preliminary meetings and consultations, forty-three dissidents, including many pastors, academics, and students, met covertly to organize the Social Democratic Party of the GDR.
