1957 West German federal election
Federal elections were held in West Germany on 15 September 1957 to elect the members of the third Bundestag. The Christian Democratic Union and its longtime ally, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, won a sweeping victory, taking 270 seats in the Bundestag to win the first – and to date, only – absolute majority for a single German parliamentary group in a free election. This was the first West German federal election to take place in the Saarland, which – as Saar protectorate – had been a separate entity under French control between 1946 and 1956. Campaign. Federal  Chancellor Adenauer had some solid advantages over his Social Democratic opponent, Erich Ollenhauer; West Germany had become fully sovereign in 1955 and had joined the European Economic Community in March 1957. Its economy was growing steadily with very low unemployment, and most West Germans felt more prosperous and more secure than in 1949 or 1953. Although the West German economic growth was more directly enhanced by the social market economy policies of Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, many West German voters gave Adenauer the credit for it. Results. The All-German Bloc lost all of their seats, but the ideologically similar  German Party maintained theirs. The 1957 election was the last time that a right-wing populist party would return members to the Bundestag until Alternative for Germany's entrance in 2017. Aftermath. Konrad Adenauer led the CDU-CSU coalition to a landslide victory. The CDU-CSU won an outright majority—to date, the only time a German party has been elected to a majority government in a free election (the CDU and CSU sit as a single bloc in the Bundestag).