	Germany had abandoned democracy in 1933, and a return to an appropriate form of democracy was a priority in all four of the allied occupation zones. Hettier de Boislambert approved the creation of the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) in Rheinland-Pfalz on 16 January 1946. Almost immediately the CDP was rebranded as the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which emphasized the importance of avoiding a political system in which the political moderate centre was fragmented into several rival parties. He was also responsible for authorizing the relaunch in his state of what became the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and for the re-establishment of both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD). At the end of his life, in reviewing this aspect of his time as governor in an autobiographical piece, Hettier de Boislambert would nevertheless assert provocatively that he himself had never been much of a democrat!