The year 2023 was not easy for the FDP: again it suffered defeats in state elections and in the traffic light coalition it stood out as a belligerent brakeman. Then the Constitutional Court ruined the end of the year for party leader and Finance Minister Lindner.
Christian Lindner is not one to shy away from difficult tasks. He proved this at the latest when he took over the leadership of the FDP ten years ago. She had just been kicked out of the Bundestag after losing the trust of her voters in the black-yellow coalition. The poll numbers back then: miserable. In some cases they were so bad that the FDP was only listed under “others”. But Lindner led the party back into the Bundestag. And how: In 2017, the Free Democrats achieved 10.7 percent, an increase of almost 6 percent. He finally canceled the explorations with the Union and the Greens with the words: “It’s better not to govern than to govern badly.”
Now, in December 2023, this statement has an unfavorable topicality for the FDP. The approval of the traffic light coalition is so low that one can assume that a large proportion of voters want to rub this sentence in the finance minister’s face. From the FDP’s point of view, the balance sheet is better than one might think: the nuclear power plants ran longer, there is a new skilled worker immigration law and when it comes to citizens’ money, it was the FDP that strengthened the idea of performance. A tax reform is expected to bring 15 billion euros in relief starting next year. FDP politicians also claim that they have made the heating law something really good. Then there are things like the abolition of paragraph 219a, which gave doctors the strictest requirements regarding information about abortions. The 49-euro ticket was also an FDP idea, devised by Transport Minister Volker Wissing.
But the people in the country see it differently. In surveys, the FDP has been teetering on the brink of the five percent hurdle for months. This means that the loss of trust in the traffic light parties has the most serious consequences for the Liberals. If you were a football team, you would be playing against relegation. Overall, the traffic light in the trend barometer from RTL and ntv, for example, only comes to a good 30 percent and is therefore on par with the Union. The bad mood was also evident in the state elections. In Berlin the FDP was thrown out of the House of Representatives, and in Bavaria it also failed to get back into the Maximilianeum. In Hesse, they managed to remain in the state parliament with a lot of trouble. A small ray of hope was the SPD stronghold of Bremen, where the re-entry was successful.
Dissatisfaction at the grassroots level
There is also discontent within his own party. The 77,000 members are currently voting on whether the FDP should remain in the traffic light coalition. This survey is not binding, but it would be a problem for Lindner if the basis was in favor of leaving. As expected, he himself is in favor of remaining in government. In an interview with ntv.de he recently said that it wasn’t a good idea to “leave without a good reason”. He can hope that the reading “Leaving the traffic light would be suicide for fear of death” will prevail. Either way, dissatisfaction is spreading. They exist for many reasons. One was the traffic light’s migration policy, as FDP member of the Bundestag Christoph Hoffmann explained to ntv.de.
If you think back to the past few months, you mostly remember arguments. In a country where a majority of people say the opposition is there to help the government govern, that doesn’t go down well. It may be that when it came to the heating law, the FDP was driven by holy anger to prevent the supposedly diabolical plans of Habeck and his State Secretary Patrick Graichen. Doing this behind closed doors and then presenting a solution together didn’t seem to be an option. There was also trouble with basic child welfare – the FDP: against it.
In the ntv.de interview, Lindner rejected the impression that the FDP in particular was looking for controversy. The Greens put the brakes on asylum policy, the SPD repeatedly questioned the debt brake – despite a fundamental agreement that this should remain untouched.
The mood in the traffic lights was already in the basement in the fall – and the Federal Constitutional Court had not yet made a ruling. When the Karlsruhe judges ruled on the second supplementary budget of 2021 on November 15th, the traffic light politicians looked into an abyss. Right in the middle: Finance Minister Lindner. He was already in office when the young traffic light coalition moved 60 billion euros in loan authorizations from the Corona crisis to the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF). As a result of the judgment, this amount had to be canceled. And astronomical sums, we’re talking about 30 billion euros in the budget and KTF, suddenly had to be saved. There was obviously no Plan B – and with such sums, perhaps there could not have been one at all.
First kerosene tax, then not
A supplementary budget for 2023 was quickly put together. From then on, Lindner, Robert Habeck and Olaf Scholz set about checking the budget for the coming year for savings options. It took four weeks. Or so we thought. Because when the three top politicians announced an agreement last Wednesday, it was a bit exaggerated. Because it is still not clear how exactly savings will be made now. Sometimes kerosene should be taxed, sometimes not. The environmental bonus for electric cars should be dropped, but there is also opposition to this within the coalition – although this time not from the FDP, but from the SPD. There is also disagreement about the taxation of agricultural diesel. Agriculture Minister Özdemir does not want to support the end of the tax break. This is, to put it mildly, confusing. You could also say a huge mess.
At least Lindner is not threatened with a palace revolution. The 44-year-old has led the party for ten years and is not only its figurehead, but also one of its thought leaders and all-purpose election campaign weapon. At the party conference in April he was re-elected with a very good 88 percent. In doing so, he is creeping closer to Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who led the party for a year longer, from 1974 to 1985. After two years in the traffic light coalition, the current chairman finds himself in a tricky situation with his party. As was the case with Black and Yellow, she is part of a government in which she finds it difficult to assert herself. In his 2017 book “Shadow Years,” Lindner writes that at that time the FDP was only perceived as an “against party.” It is not the only passage that shows parallels to today – even if Lindner prefers to describe the FDP as a pro-party.
At that time, the FDP allowed Chancellor Angela Merkel to abandon a tax reform that had actually been agreed upon. “The curtain had basically fallen on the coalition – except that the actors continued to perform on stage for three more years, while the audience had long since been looking for the exits in disappointment.” The FDP did not adequately defend itself against the rejection of the tax reform. “I swore to myself: This will never happen to me again. Voters will remember for years that their own agenda was changed, but not why it happened and whether there were good reasons for it.”
The next federal election is in autumn 2025. It is not expected that Lindner will avoid controversy in the future. Because there’s one thing he certainly doesn’t want: to drown in harmony with the traffic lights.