ABSTRACT
The period between the late 1940s and late 1950s was the decade when the balance of political power between government and opposition was most static and when divisions over democratic legitimacy ran deepest. In all three states, political actors distrusted each other’s democratic credentials so much that power did not change hands in the decade following the first postwar parliamentary elections; government and opposition remained in their respective places. The Cold War played a major role in creating and consolidating these stark divides. It definitively broke up the antifascist coalitions in France and Italy in the spring of 1947 and played a major role in West Germany, too. There, the SPD criticized the Christian Democrats’ commitment to firmly anchoring the country in the Western alliance, whereas Adenauer expressed anti-Marxism Cold War antagonisms among political parties over who deserved democratic legitimacy. At the time, people experienced the democratization of Western Europe as precarious and threatened by setbacks.
