In a vote on military spending for a new armored cruiser, for example, the SPD leadership felt it necessary to go against its own party's overwhelming opposition in order to preserve the coalition.

After the Bürgerblock government under Chancellor Wilhelm Marx (Centre) broke apart because of the member parties' differing ideas on school policy, Reichstag elections were held on 20 May 1928.

A competing proposal to have the Prussian minister president Otto Braun as chancellor in a personal union of the two positions was quickly discarded.

[2] President Paul von Hindenburg would have preferred to see DVP chairman Ernst Scholz as chancellor but allowed himself to be persuaded by his inner circle, which expected a Social Democratic chancellorship to erode SPD support in the medium term.

He insisted on Wilhelm Groener as Reichswehr (armed forces) minister and rejected the appointment of Joseph Wirth from the left wing of the Centre Party as vice-chancellor (the position remained vacant under Müller).

The Centre, which did not want to see itself bound to full participation in the government, finally sent Theodor von Guérard as an "observer" to the cabinet, where he took over the post of minister of Transport.

While the Reichsrat, Parliament's upper house led by Prussia, had spoken out against the construction in December 1927, the Reichstag, with the Bürgerblock parties in the majority, had voted in favor.

[9] The Reichsrat responded on 31 March 1928, the day of the Reichstag's dissolution, with a request to the cabinet, which was then acting only in a managing capacity, to approve the construction of the ship after 1 September 1928 and a renewed examination of the financial situation.

In the 1928 Reichstag election campaign, the left-wing parties SPD and KPD had sharply criticized the plan and demanded that it be abandoned in favor of social projects.

The issue came up in the cabinet in August 1928 when Minister of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Groener submitted a motion to approve the first instalment for the construction of the armored cruiser.

[12] Moreover, the Social Democrats' votes could not prevent the granting of funds for the construction of the armored cruiser since the middle class parties were able to put together a majority against the SPD's motion to stop the project.

[13] The coalition had to deal with its first major social and economic crisis in the so-called Ruhr iron dispute, the "largest and longest lockout Germany had ever experienced".

When the bargaining parties were unable to reach an agreement, a state-appointed arbitrator, High Court Counsel Wilhelm Joetten, made a ruling on 26 October 1928.

In a legal procedure that had become common in 1923, the minister of labor, in this case the Social Democrat Rudolf Wissell, declared the arbitrator's award in such a situation universally binding.

At a time when a Social Democratic-led government was once again established at the national level, the employers used the industrial action of lockouts to vigorously oppose "state wage determination".

Some cities in the eastern coalfields started to pay welfare benefits without first checking the recipients' individual needs and without linking the payments to a later obligation to repay.

[17] At the beginning of November, the SPD and the KPD presented motions in the Reichstag to provide state support to those who had been locked out, which were passed with a large majority against the votes of the DVP.

[19] The 1929 Young Plan, a program for settling Germany's World War I reparations, established a schedule for paying 112 billion gold marks over a period of 59 years.

Even though it lowered the previous total payments by 20 percent, nationalist parties such as the DNVP and Nazis opposed it, including with a referendum that proposed a "Law Against the Enslavement of the German People".

Since all parties of the coalition wanted the Reichstag to accept the Young Plan, fundamental decisions of financial policy were postponed until after it was ratified on 12 March 1930.

[22] The president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, had previously publicly denounced the government's financial policy as unsound and was subsequently able to insist that an additional 450 million Reichsmarks for debt reduction be raised in 1930.

The SPD Reichstag deputy Max Seydewitz, later of the KPD and the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany, stated that coalition politics was "a great danger for social democracy, for the working class and for the existence of the Republic".

[6] Because they considered the existence of the Republic to be assured, part of the left was prepared to leave the responsibility for government to the middle class parties until a new revolutionary situation arose.

He publicly expressed his approval of "Führerism in a grand style" and made several disparaging remarks about Stresemann's foreign policy, which he considered "finished".

When Hindenburg denied his request to issue an emergency decree under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, he handed in the resignation of the entire cabinet on the evening of 27 March 1930.

For some time the influential group around Hindenburg, members of the Reichswehr, leaders from heavy industry and large-scale agrarians had been looking for ways to establish a government without and against the Social Democrats.

The key question is who bears the main responsibility for the breakup of the coalition in March 1930 and for the Reichstag losing so much political weight through the establishment of the presidential cabinets that followed it.

According to Conze, the coalition was not immediately followed by a systematic attempt to roll back parliamentarism, and Brüning had in fact tried to save the endangered German democracy.

He interpreted Heinrich Brüning's chancellorship as the first stage in the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and assigns responsibility for the failure of parliamentarism to the old power elites – the president, the Reichswehr, big agriculture and heavy industry.

The studies also show that in the spring of 1930, an anti-parliamentary alternative to the government had been developed, above all by opponents of the Social Democrats in the circle around President Hindenburg, and that it had weakened the political position of the Reichstag as a whole.