Christian Lindner had probably imagined the election evening differently. Where in November, when the coalition is falling, he still dreamed of a revival in the polls, the party leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was hard on the facts on Sunday evening. With 4.3 percent of the votes, FDP is short of participation in the Bundestag. The situation is reminiscent of 2013, when the liberal party did not reach 0.2 percentage point after the electoral threshold and was therefore not allowed to deliver Bundestag members.
In the previous elections in 2021, the cards were very different. After a progressive twist and a successful campaign, the liberal party received 12 percent of the votes in Germany. FDP scored well among young people: among the Germans who cast their votes for the first time, the Greens (who received a total of 15 percent of the votes) and FDP were the most popular. Because these two ‘small parties’ were able to help both the Social Democrats SPD (25.7 percent) and the Christian Democrats CDU/CSU (24.1 percent) to a majority coalition, they could determine the conditions.
The negotiations eventually resulted in a coalition with the SPD, called the ‘traffic light coalition’, because of the yellow color that the FDP has in Germany, in addition to the red of the Social Democrats and the green of the Greens. On December 7, 2021, they put their signatures under the coalition agreement ‘more progress’, full of ambitious plans to make and digitize the country, to lower bureaucracy and encourage ‘innovation and entrepreneurial spirit’. Another striking point in the agreement: “Germany [is] A migration country, “the parties wrote. They wanted to make labor migration easier, just like following a course in Germany.
Yet that didn’t go well for long. Soon after the elections, rumbling arose in traffic light coalition. The ideological differences between the parties soon turned out to be very great: although they found each other in foreign policy, they had other views on finances and social themes. For example, the Greens wanted to increase the minimum wage and taxes, while FDP finds the minimum wage no task for the government and wanted to reduce taxes. The SDP had more interfaces with the Greens than with the FDP. At the end of last year it came to a boiling point. Lindner had already stuck the coalition to force concessions, but now they really didn’t seem to come out anymore.
Debt brake
The coalition fell on November 6, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his Minister of Finance because the parties could not agree on the budget of 2025. “I feel forced to take this step to prevent damage to our country” , said Scholz. “We need a government that is able to take action and that has the power to make the necessary decisions for our country.” The FDP then withdrew its ministers from the government, who lost its majority.
Lindner immediately crawled into the victim role and accused Scholz of planning his departure. But soon internal documents appeared that told a different story. In a PowerPoint presentation called ‘D-Day scenarios and measures’, the party in eight slides appeared to have accurately planned the end of the coalition. Lindner wanted to put an end to the unpopular government.
When the liberals did not reach the electoral threshold in three state elections last fall, Lindner thought that there should be a change of course. By distance itself from the coalition and clinging to classical liberal subjects – the Debtthe legally recorded requirement that the German budget deficit may be a maximum of 0.35 percent of GDP, and tax reductions – Lindner hoped to win over the voters again. He just didn’t seem like a good idea to him. The speech he gave on the day of his resignation turned out to be written before.
Negative daylight
Due to the revelation of the internal documents, his plan only turned out something else. The shrewd plan brought his party into a negative light, reinforced by the use of the term ‘D-Day’, which is sensitive in Germany. There was also a crisis internally: two party prominent people, including the Secretary General of the FDP, resigned at the end of November. In the tight three months thereafter, the party failed to overcome that blow.
The FDP, which was founded in 1948 and has since been part of six governments, is known for making and breaking coalitions. With the breaking of the traffic light coalition, Lindner took a big gamble, which he lost. Whether he can remain at the helm of the FDP is highly the question. However, this does not have to mean the end of the liberal party: after four years of absence in the Bundestag, the FDP returned in 2017 with 10.6 percent of the votes.
Christian Lindner will no longer experience a possible return of the FDP in parliament. The party leader announced on Sunday, before it was definitely known that his party had not reached the electoral threshold, his departure from politics. The result, Lindner hoped, had to mean “a new beginning for Germany”. “That is what I fought for,” he wrote on X.