On 20 June 1948, the Anglo–American military government introduced the Deutsche mark into the American and British zones. On the same day, Ludwig Erhard, the as yet politically independent bizonal director of the economy, released a series of consumer goods from the price controls that the Nazis introduced in 1936. The introduction of the free-price mechanism represented the first step on West Germany's path toward what became known as the social market economy by the following year. When Christian Democrats met in Düsseldorf in June 1949, they fully embraced Erhard's free market policies and entered into the first Bundestag campaign as defenders of the Marktwirtschaft against the hated Zwangswirtschaft. Henceforth, the social market economy served as the CDU's economic policy and as a model against which Christian Democrats could contrast not only the National Socialist command economy, but the East German Communist experiment as well.

The CDU's adoption of the free-market social market economy represents one of the most controversial topics of postwar German history. Until mid-1947, Christian Democrats had embraced the idea that the experience of Nazism discredited free-market capitalism. Driven by the so-called Christian socialists, the CDU adopted many of the same measures as the SPD to reform the economy, from the socialization of heavy industry to increased worker influence in industry, in the Ahlen Program of February 1947.