Mainstream parties countered the BHE threat by co-opting expellee demands

Evidence

First, the chapters show that both groups were spread out on the political spectrum of established parties, especially during the first decades after their arrival. Due to their status as outsiders, expellees tended to join outsider parties (CDU/CSU in Protestant regions, SPD in rural areas) except the Communist Party, which, in their view, had been discredited by the Red Army and the GDR’s recognition of the Oder–Neisse border. In a reaction to the foundation of an expellee party, the right-wing Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (BHE) in 1950, Christian and Social Democrats established special sub-organizations in order to win the expellees over. Both parties took up the BdV’s ‘right to the homeland’ claims and offered prominent expellee activists career opportunities, a competition that was still not entirely closed throughout the 1960s. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 85

Categorization

• XREF: Co-optation of a grievance-based third party by established parties mirrors theories of issue-capture and the dynamics seen with other protest or ethnic parties. — connects to: Main parties competed for leadership over the expellee constituency for instrumental reasons. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 163; Mainstream parties co-opted BHE leaders with ministries and funding, then steered their aims — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 762; Expellee politics collapsed once core social demands were met — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 115 (+1 more)
• SEED: The BHE’s rise and absorption is itself the core case this reader seeks — an angle: how absorbing a threat-party’s agenda defuses it but at the cost of entrenching its grievance frame in the mainstream.

Broader Connections

• Mainstream parties co-opted BHE leaders with ministries and funding, then steered their aims #expands (0.95) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 762
• Main parties competed for leadership over the expellee constituency for instrumental reasons. #corroborates (0.90) — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 163
• Co-opting a grievance party into government stripped it of its protest function #corroborates (0.90) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 744
• Expellee politics collapsed once core social demands were met #exemplifies (0.80) — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 115