After their electoral defeat in Lower Saxony, the FDP wants to become more stubborn, the traffic light coalition in Berlin is facing more violent clashes. “We must prevent left-wing projects from being implemented in this coalition,” said FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai on Sunday evening on ARD. “The voice of the FDP in this coalition must be even clearer.” This not only points to new disputes, for example in energy and financial policy. That should also worry the SPD and the Greens, many of whom argue that they already showed too much consideration for the liberal coalition partner last year.
In the state elections in Lower Saxony, the FDP failed at the five percent hurdle with 4.7 percent of the second votes and kicked out of the state legislature. The Greens, on the other hand, have made gains, and in all likelihood they will form a coalition with the SPD, which has lost percentage points, but far less than the poor poll numbers could have caused nationwide. Last but not least, the FDP was punished for its participation in the traffic light – this is how its top candidate in Lower Saxony, Stefan Birkner, sees it: “It is difficult to make the middle-class voice clear with two left-wing parties.”
The Liberals, led by Christian Lindner, are under pressure: they have lost massively in all four state elections since the federal election. In Saarland they are also no longer in parliament, in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia they just about managed to re-enter, but were kicked out of government. Now they are faced with the question of whether they have done themselves a favor by entering into a federal coalition with the SPD and the Greens.
There have been debates in the traffic light before – now it should be even more uncomfortable
Leaving this is obviously not an option. FDP leader Lindner spoke on the evening of the election of state political responsibility in the crisis. Christian Dürr, chairman of the FDP parliamentary group in the Bundestag, says: “It stays the same: we take responsibility for Germany.” The times are “challenging,” says Dürr, and there are difficult decisions to be made in the coming weeks. It is important now to “think about the country”.
But Dürr also says: “The traffic light is not an easy alliance for the FDP, that was clear from the start.” Now his party wants to differentiate itself more clearly within the coalition, “marking its positions more clearly,” as party deputy Wolfgang Kubicki puts it. There are no sensible answers to key challenges in the crisis, he complains. “We’ll have to work on that, or this traffic light will get into rough water.” On Monday morning, the Presidium and Federal Executive Committee of the FDP will analyze the situation.
All this means that the SPD and the Greens will have a more nervous coalition partner in the future, which will probably make them even more uncomfortable. “It’s worrying that the FDP didn’t make it,” said Green Party leader Omid Nouripour on Monday morning. Because it’s not as if there weren’t any arguments at the traffic lights recently.
Party leader Lindner or other personal details are not up for discussion
The debates about a gas levy, the demand for longer operating times for nuclear power plants, with which the FDP has irritated the Greens time and time again, sticking to the debt brake, tax cuts, the insistence on rather loose corona measures or the categorical no to favorite projects the partners like a speed limit on the motorways: The willingness to compromise has also been severely tested on the part of the SPD and the Greens. However, the fact that it did not help the FDP in the Lower Saxony election campaign to focus on the energy issue, i.e. on the demand to draw more electricity from nuclear and coal-fired power plants, does not seem to have been found by the liberals so far.
And just as little as their coalition participation, they do not question their party leader. The influential party deputy Kubicki ruled out a discussion about the staff as soon as the first forecast was available at 6 p.m. The Liberals are “a closed team,” he said on ARD. This also applies to Lindner.