especially well in rural areas, while also dominating the city of Hanover thanks to the support of the industrial working class. Lastly, the party also performed well in Roman Catholic areas, such as the Duchy of Meppen-Lingen. In 1980, the regionalist supporters met in the city of Einbeck, where Hannoverscher Wahlverein responsible for picking election candidates was proclaimed. The party mainly focused on cultivating its strenght in rural areas, advocating protectionist measures to protect the Hanoverian agriculture and combat competition from Prussian landowners. The party appealed to the regionalist sentiment by reminding voters of "good times" before 1866, such as lower taxes under independent Hanover. One of the main element of the DHP's campaign was its newspaper Deutsche Volkszeitung, which maintained a small circulation of 6000 copies sold daily. The party was also supported by unrelated regionalist newspapers, such as the Deutsch-Hannoversche Volkskalender. Throghout the 19th century, the German-Hanoverian Party remained strictly separatist and campaigned mainly on local issues, while only commenting on national developments from a Hanoverian perspective. The DHP was closely associated with Ludwig Windthorst, who used to be a minister in independent Hanover. Despite supporting and campaigning for DHP, Windthorst never joined the party, and focused on building an all-Catholic coalition, becoming a co-founded of the Catholic Centre Party in the process. Once the Centre Party entered politics, the DHP cooperated with it; both parties were opposed to étatism and Prussian taxation, while also seeking a more decentralised German union and the preservation of confessional schools. As such, the German-Hanoverian Party condemned the Kulturkampf and spoke in favour of Roman Catholic interests. Despite its conservative outlook, the DHP also opposed the Anti-Socialist Laws, as many of the party members "felt a genuine obligation to protect the working class and thus found it expedient to cooperate with the SPD". The party deputies also opposed and criticised the colonial policies of Germany, voting against army expansions and condemning colonial expansion as the cause of diplomatic tensions with other colonial empires. The party suffered a severe decline in the early 20th century, as its "clerical-proletarian-agrarian coalition" began to break down. Industrial workers started flocking to the SDP as industrialisation progressed, while many landed proprietors and small businesses switched to the German Agrarian League. Lastly, the party also lost the support of local Roman Catholics as it severed its ties to the Catholic Centre Party in 1912. The main reason for