analysis
Failed at the five percent hurdle in Bavaria, in Hesse it was back in the state parliament with a lot of trouble: the FDP is not doing well. But self-criticism is difficult for liberals.
Anyone who follows the FDP’s election results over the past two years will experience déjà vu several times a year. Since joining the traffic light coalition, the FDP has lost one state election after another, but every time it continues as before. Although party leader Christian Lindner regularly calls for a critical review of the government’s work, he ultimately does not mean himself, but rather the coalition partners SPD and Greens.
Actually – Lindner was convinced of this at the press conference the day after the elections in Bavaria and Hesse – the citizens would have voted entirely in the spirit of the FDP. People are concerned with strengthening the economy, curbing migration, a climate policy with a sense of proportion and fewer bans and bureaucracy.
The FDP stands for all of this. Unfortunately, the party is held jointly liable for the bad image of the traffic light coalition. And she herself is unable to present her positions visibly and credibly in the traffic light coalition. Lindner concludes: “For the coalition in Berlin as a whole, yesterday’s election Sunday is now a work order.” Ultimately, all three coalition partners lost.
More and more MPs are uncomfortable with traffic lights
That’s of course true: calculated in percentage points, the Greens suffered the biggest losses. The SPD, in turn, fell to historically poor results in Bavaria and Hesse. But the FDP was thrown out of the state parliament in Bavaria and also had to worry for a long time about getting back into the state parliament in Hesse.
Recently there was a similar tremor in Bremen (5.1 percent), but also the failure to pass the five percent hurdle in Saarland (4.8 percent) and in Lower Saxony (4.7 percent) last year as well as in Berlin (4.6 percent) this year.
The only question is: How long can the FDP afford the decline in the federal states? When might the point have come at which Lindner would have to say, as he did in 2017 – when he left the negotiations for a Jamaica coalition with the CDU/CSU and the Greens -: “It is better not to govern than to govern incorrectly”?
After all, internal critics of the traffic light coalition, such as FDP MP Frank Schäffler, have long been saying that the traffic light hangs like a millstone around the party’s neck and is dragging it further and further into the abyss. It’s not just FDP voters who are “strange” with the traffic lights, as FDP vice-president Wolfgang Kubicki repeatedly states, but also more and more MPs.
Parts of the party have been calling for “pure FDP” for a long time
Only recently did the frustration within the party come to light. In the internal election of the FDP parliamentary group board at the halfway point of the legislative period, a number of members were elected with significantly worse results than two years ago.
While parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr was confirmed with almost 93 percent, MPs who are considered more “traffic light-friendly” only achieved results between 60 and 65 percent. Group deputy Lukas Köhler was even challenged by Schäffler and had to go to a second round of voting.
Parts of the party have been calling for “pure FDP” for a long time. At the party conference in April, Schäffler and Co. achieved with their critical proposals that the FDP publicly positioned itself much more critically on the heating law than before in the internal negotiations. When it comes to migration, it is also clear that the party will not engage in discussions behind the scenes, as the SPD and especially the Greens would like.
Among those who stand for a more independent profile in the traffic lights is FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai, who recently described the Greens as a “security risk for our country” because of their migration policy. After the state elections on Sunday, he called for the traffic light to “develop a common understanding” on important issues such as the economy and migration. That hasn’t been the case so far: “We actually have to sit down together again and think about what we can achieve together as a coalition or whether we are even able to achieve these goals.”
There is a lot at stake for the FDP
However, critics like Djir-Sarai, Kubicki and Schäffler leave it open what concrete consequences this will have for the continued coexistence of the traffic light, and whether they can imagine a premature failure of the traffic light coalition.
Would the proverbial “ending with horror” be easier for the party to cope with than “endless horror”? Party leader Lindner clearly contradicts this. His argument: The FDP is a “state-supporting party” and sets the tone for the coalition in terms of content – even more than its political weight would suggest.
What he doesn’t say, but what may play a role behind closed doors: There would be a lot at stake for the party if the coalition broke up. Probably too much. In this case, the FDP would have to give up its ministries, especially the Ministry of Finance, which Lindner had already targeted before the federal election and in which, from the FDP’s perspective, he has also achieved a lot.
Stressful interactions at traffic lights
Lindner is particularly praised by business representatives for measures such as mitigating cold progression and the Growth Promotion Act. The head of the Württemberg mechanical engineering company Trumpf, Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller, said when asked by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” whether the government was listening to business: “At the federal level at least one party, the FDP. I’m happy every single day that they FDP is in this government.”
However, it is questionable whether the FDP will be elected to prevent something worse from the perspective of many middle-class voters. If new elections were to take place, the party would have to worry about returning to the Bundestag, as in many state elections.
And so the FDP remains in the traffic light dilemma: it is part of a government in which it sees itself as a bourgeois corrective to a “left-wing government” on many issues. She has to emphasize this again and again for the sake of her profile, which of course puts a strain on interaction at traffic lights. And with it the image of the coalition, of which the FDP is part.