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East Germany CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK
The constitution of 1949, promulgated on October 7 of that
year to coincide with the founding of the republic, was based on
a parliamentary-democratic model. In fact, however, the various
parliamentary-democratic provisions of the 1949 constitution did
not hinder the emergence of a centralized and authoritarian
political order under the hegemony of the SED. The original
intentions of the constitution, framed under the specific
historical conditions of the "antifascist democratic order" of
1945-49 (as SED historians refer to it), were simply altered over
the years to incorporate changing realities. Thus, while many of
the rights and guarantees of the original document were retained,
a number of subsequent legal additions were made at the
initiative of the SED with the concurrence of the People's
Chamber.
Data as of July 1987
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