THE PARTY SYSTEM
Luxembourg is a small Grand Duchy of approximately 365,000 inhabitants situated between Belgium, Federal Germany and France. Its experience of competitive party politics goes back to the foundation of a ‘Catholic Action Committee’ to contest the 1848 elections in opposition to the then ‘Liberal’ hegemony in Parliament. The first socialist deputy was elected in 1896, while the country's first proper political party, the ‘Social Democratic Party of Luxembourg’, was founded in 1902. By 1914, the forerunners of today's three main parties, one Socialist, one Liberal, and one Christian-Democrat, were all fully organized. Since 1919 they have contested elections on the basis of universal suffrage, and have virtually monopolized Government. Of the others, only the Communists survived as a parliamentary party for the entire post-war period. However, they only participated in government once (the so-called ‘Government of National Union’ from 1946 to 1947). The Christian Social Party, CSV, led every post-war government until 1974; while the other two – the Socialists and Liberals – neatly alternated as the CSV's junior coalition partners in response to their varying fortunes at the polls.
As in Belgium, this deeply entrenched four-party system was rooted in a two-dimensional structure among the electorate which superimposed the newer socio-economic class cleavage upon the older clerical/anti-clerical one which had given birth to the original two-party system. Over the past twenty years, however, two important changes have taken place.