long before it had entered the field with its own candidates for office. It ran its own candidates in the 7 December 1929 provincial election in Thuringia, one of the organization's strongholds, although these garnered just 12,000 votes. In other elections, it supported the slate of candidates of the official Communist Party of Germany, including the candidacy of Ernst Thälmann for President in the election of March 1932. The KPO counted approximately 1,000 members after its supporters had been expelled from the KPD, many of them local leaders of the party. In the years that followed, they failed to recruit any further adherents from outside the party and gradually decreased in number. The KPO backed the KPD on most public issues, but it did stand their own candidates in some elections and ran other campaigns. Their members were also active in the existing trade unions in contrast to the KPD which launched a policy of forming radical dual unions during the so-called Third Period between 1929 and 1934. Drive for a united front against fascism In the period when the KPD was denouncing the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as social fascists and retreating from joint anti-fascist work with non-Communists, Brandler and the KPO were strongly in favor of the establishment of a united front against the menace of Nazism and were particularly critical of the Communist Party's conception that "once the Nazis get into power, then will the united front of the proletariat rise and brush them aside". Instead, the KPO called for the immediate formation of a broad anti-fascist alliance including the Social Democratic-controlled trade union federation, the Social Democrats, Communists and the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD). Campaigning for a united front as a small group did not give the KPO more influence with the general public, but the threat of the Nazis did lead to a leftward movement within the SPD. This leftist tendency in the SPD left that party in 1931 and organised themselves as the SAPD which elements within the KPO felt they should join. After an internal struggle in which the majority of the KPO backed Brandler and Thalheimer, a minority led by Frölich and Jakob Walcher refused to accept the decisions of the fourth conference of the KPO held in January 1932. The leadership replied to this challenge by stating that the breach of discipline implied the minority had excluded