Comment on criticism from Djir-Sarai: FDP in the fight for survival

FDP General Secretary Djir-Sarai sharply criticizes his own coalition partners – and at the same time makes advances to the Union. The tactic won’t work says Björn Dake. The whole thing seems more like a desperate fight for survival.

Drowning people lash out wildly – and that’s exactly what the FDP is currently doing. Understandably, with poll numbers of four percent, the party is up to its neck. If there were a federal election next Sunday, the Liberals would probably go straight out of government and into the extra-parliamentary opposition.

This happened once in 2013. In the FDP they remember it well – it remains a trauma. But the liberals seem to be at a loss as to how to prevent this history from repeating itself.

Economic liberals on Confrontation course

With good government work in the traffic lights – say the rather young, progressive ones in the FDP. They had great hope in the self-proclaimed progress coalition. They wanted to modernize Germany – in social policy, civil rights or digital. Here the SPD, Greens and FDP look at things very similarly. But that’s obviously not enough to hold the coalition together.

The economic liberals in the group and party are focusing on other issues anyway. They emphasize how fundamentally different the coalition partners view the state and the market – the FDP on the one hand, the SPD and the Greens on the other. This is also how General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai should be understood when he denies the Reds and Greens that they have understood the social market economy.

FDP blocks Germany in the EU

There is no need to overestimate such sentences. Just as a drowning person struggles to stay above the surface of the water, the FDP is currently struggling to be visible at all. After all, European elections are coming up soon. Recently, the party has particularly attracted attention for its uncompromising approach to agreements on European initiatives and for forcing German abstention.

Now the Secretary General is publicly questioning the coalition – in the hope of not being associated with the traffic light’s poor approval ratings. If there is a tactic behind it: it won’t work.

The coalition can try to survive together through good governance over the next few months – or they will perish together. By the way: A look at the current survey results shows that even black and yellow would not be a saving grace.