Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the German politics myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Pressure is growing on Germany’s liberals to pull out of the country’s fractious coalition government, as voters threaten an electoral wipeout for the party.
On Monday, 26 regional and metropolitan party leaders wrote to FDP chair Christian Lindner, who is also Germany’s finance minister, urging him to leave the three way “traffic light” coalition under chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Support for the FDP has haemorrhaged in recent months, with many voters perceiving the party as the “loser” in Scholz’s government amid a faltering economy and the war in Ukraine, with little evidence of its pro-business, small-government credo in action.
Instead, the Greens, led by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, and Scholz’s Social Democrats have dominated the agenda, championing interventionist measures such as a ban on gas boilers and industrial subsidies which are deeply unpopular with FDP supporters.
The FDP was kicked out of Bavaria’s state parliament altogether on October 8, after it failed to cross the 5 per cent threshold necessary for parties to hold parliamentary seats. In neighbouring Hesse it only just scraped in.
Given these “significant losses”, the letter from regional liberal leaders reads, “the FDP must urgently reconsider its coalition partners”. Being part of a coalition government will lead to “the imminent demise of the only liberal party in Germany”, they claim.
Speaking at an event held by the Rheinische Post newspaper in Düsseldorf on Monday evening, Lindner defended the FDP’s record and did not rule out quitting the coalition.
“There may already come a point where I say: it is better not to govern than to govern wrongly,” he said. Spending too much time with Green politicians, he joked, was “not good for karma”.
First elected as a regional MP at the age of 21, Lindner, now 44, remains popular among the party’s base but has limited options for manoeuvre, say experts.
“The [signatories] are expressing a widespread feeling among FDP members and followers,” said Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the university of Mainz. “But in some ways their concerns are irrelevant because there is no real alternative for the FDP at the moment [than to stay in government].”
The party’s slide in the polls will probably lead to a hardening of its policies, Falter said.
Recent weeks have already seen the party take an increasingly strident stance on immigration. On Sunday, Lindner and justice minister Marco Buschmann, who is also an FDP member, penned an article in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper calling for a “reduction of benefits to zero” for asylum seekers who should have filed their applications in other EU countries.
Under the bloc’s rules, migrants can be returned to the first EU country they set foot on which should be responsible for their registration. But in practice, many asylum seekers turn up in Germany without a record of where they initially landed.
Immigration has become a key issue for the FDP since many of its supporters switched to the two rightwing opposition parties with the hardest stance on it: the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The most recent federal polling puts support for the CDU at 30 per cent and AfD at 21 per cent. The FDP distantly trails with just 5 per cent, down from the 10.7 per cent it won in the 2021 election.
As such, the party is currently on track to see this month’s disaster in Bavaria repeated nationwide, potentially depriving the FDP — the party with the single longest record in government in postwar democratic Germany — of any parliamentary seats at all. The next federal elections are scheduled for October 2025 but if the coalition collapsed, there could be early elections.
The FDP was kicked out of the Bundestag before, in 2013, when it fell below the 5 per cent threshold for the first time in its history — a shocking result that led to a clear-out of the party’s leadership — and the accession of Lindner to the top job.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance the FDP faces is that it has few tangible policy victories of its own it can sell. Its role in the coalition — where it exercises a significant but broad influence on matters concerning spending — is likely to remain reactive and restrictive, rather than proactive and dynamic.
“They have ended up in the politics of modification and not direction,” said Falter. “For the FDP it may well have been a mistake in joining this coalition right from the beginning.”
Read the full article here