In the course of pursuing public office, the agrarian failures of the 1920s prompted Hitler to further explain the "true" meaning of Point 17 (land reform, legal land expropriation for public utility, abolishment of the land value tax and proscription of land speculation), in the hope of winning the farmers' votes in the May 1928 elections. Hitler disguised the implicit contradictions of Point 17 of the National Socialist Program, by explaining that "gratuitous expropriation concerns only the creation of legal opportunities, to expropriate, if necessary, land which has been illegally acquired, or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies".