User:Dr Gangrene/Maulkuerfgesetz background

Background
From 1930 onwards, Luxembourg had been suffering the consequences of the Great Depression, as had the rest of Europe. Initially, until about 1933, the number of unemployed still remained low, A large number of foreign immigrants had been employed in industry, and these were the first to be laid off when the economy turned sour. As they returned to their countries of origin, they did not appear in Luxembourg's unemployment figures. From 1929 to 1939, the percentage of foreigners in the active population went from 29,9% to 19,1%.

The government under Bech had a classical liberal economic policy and rejected the Workers' Party's proposals for a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, reduction of working hours, and a public investment programme. From 1932, layoffs started to affect Luxembourgers as well, and the unemployed in that year were estimated at 2,000.

This economic development had consequences for politics in general and trade unions in particular.

The Communist Party of Luxembourg (KPL) had been in decline during the 1920s: it had only 200 members in 1928. For this reason, the government had never taken any repressive measures against it, as it posed no threat. After 1929, due to the economic crisis, the party experienced a massive revival.

The Communist International declared the social democrats in the 1920s to be the main enemy of the proletariat, as they could be expected to compromise with the bourgeoisie and thereby prevent a revolutionary uprising.

For this reason the KPL founded the "Revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsopposition" (RGO), which was to compete with the socialist trade unions. The RGO achieved particular success amongs the miners, who the most militant out of the workers. In the workers' chamber elections in 1934 it achieved 9,9% of votes.

The Nazis' rise to power in Germany in 1933, clerical fascism in Austria in 1934, the increasing success of fascist movements even in countries with strong parliamentary traditions like Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom led to a change of thought within the Comintern. The communist parties of Europe, operating under the assumption that rifts within the workers' movement would only make the fascists' work easier, started to espouse the "popular front" policy. Communists sought alliances with socialists, social democrats and the middle-class left in order to fend off their common enemy, the fascists. In August 1934, therefore, the RGO was dissolved.

At the parliamentary elections of 3 June 1934, the first Luxembourgish Communist Deputy was elected, Zénon Bernard; the Communists also received 7,2% of the vote in the South constituency, thereby only just missing out on winning a second seat. The Communists' success proved a shock to both the government and the opposition socialists.

The Bech govenrment reacted sharply to the Communist victory. Bech, who was also the education minister, ordered the dismissal of two teachers, Dominique Urbany and Jean Kill, who were members of the KPL. On 27 November 1934, Bernard's election to the Chamber of Deputies was declared invalid, and his seat was allocated to the Workers' Party.

The origins of the "Law for the defence of the political and social order", also named the Loi Bech after the prime minister Joseph Bech, go back to the year 1934. The government, a coalition of the Right Party and the Radical Liberal Party, put the proposed law to the Chamber of Deputies on 2 May 1935. Little happened from then to December 1936.

The parties supporting the Bech Ministry, the Right Party and the Liberals, were in favour of the law, the opposition (consisting of the Socialists and other left-wing parties) were not. It took almost 3 years until the law's text was clarified. To understand how a party that received just 9% of the vote in the Chamber elections (many of them protest votes) was seen as such a threat that it had to be banned, one must look at the political context of the time. Especially for the Christian-conservatives, communism was the embodiment of all evil; the Liberals, as representatives of industry and the world of business, were not much more well-disposed. Additionally, the prime minister Joseph Bech had never been a friend of universal suffrage, introduced in 1919, and was nostalgic for census suffrage for the rest of his life.