analysis
Survey results show: The FDP is in danger of being divided between parts of its electorate. The party doesn’t implement enough of one in the government, it blocks too much of the other. How is she going to get out of there?
Judging by the FDP’s latest poll numbers, party leader Christian Lindner currently appears relatively relaxed. As finance minister, he appeared in front of the cameras on Tuesday about the traffic light coalition’s new pension package, and on Thursday he started the budget talks for 2025: As the smallest coalition partner, the FDP holds a key ministry and has great influence. No other ministry can ignore it.
But the party has been weakening for months – and is falling back on its core clientele of five percent. According to surveys, she would have to fear being re-entered into parliament if there were federal elections next Sunday.
Is it because of the three-way alliance? Internally, people see this quite self-critically, the FDP also contributed a lot to it themselves.
The role of corrective is not enough
In the traffic light coalition, she threatens to break up between parts of her electorate. On the one hand, there are those who view the green coalition partner with great skepticism. They approve of the blockade in the EU supply chain directive and would prefer to see black and yellow. They wrote masses of excited emails to FDP members of the Bundestag when Habeck denied a wave of insolvencies among small craft businesses in the energy crisis autumn of 2022, but expected production stops in certain sectors.
On the other hand, the FDP annoys voters with its repeated blockade maneuvers – especially younger people who associated the move into the digital age with the FDP, but also saw points of connection with the Greens. For them, the FDP role is not enough to just be corrective. They want more design projects instead of complaints about how difficult it is with the traffic light partners.
In terms of financial and economic policy, the FDP operates differently than the SPD and the Greens. The three parties had found the common label of the “progress coalition”. But what does progress mean in concrete draft laws and measures? Ideas often differ widely.
In the analysis, Lindner agrees with the Green Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Robert Habeck that the economy needs to be particularly promoted right now. But how? When it comes to this question, the two are worlds apart.
The role of the Union
The Union, in turn, is currently clearly pursuing the strategy of picking on the FDP and asking it to leave the coalition. CDU leader Friedrich Merz recently said, with a view to the blockades and debates within the traffic light coalition, that there is no need for two opposition leaders in Germany – one in the government and one in parliament.
Union parliamentary group vice-president Jens Spahn followed up with criticism of pension policy on Deutschlandfunk: “The FDP always believes that it can prevent worse things from happening at traffic lights. My impression: it is once again making quite wrong things possible at traffic lights and should ask again whether it is doing the right thing .”
There is of course a strategy behind this with a view to upcoming elections, including the 2025 federal election: the Union and FDP are targeting similar voter milieus.
Let the alliance of convenience collapse?
One could say that the Lindner FDP is currently performing a constant balancing act that is getting itself into trouble on many sides. For example with the stock pension: To do this, debts have to be taken out that have to be used for investments – contrary to what the FDP originally thought. The interest on the debt is first deducted from the return, and what is left is a reform in the eyes of many FDP voters: the total expenditure on pension insurance is currently 360 billion euros. Ten billion in returns does not solve the fundamental financial problem of pension insurance.
There is a constant discussion in political Berlin as to whether the FDP now has the calculation to prematurely collapse the unpopular alliance of convenience between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP – there was concern around the SPD party conference in December, for example, when it became clear that the Federal budget 2024 could only be agreed upon among the coalition partners and budget holders in the Bundestag after the beginning of the year, if at all.
The 2025 budget, which is currently being negotiated, could actually become a new test for the traffic lights. When it comes to social spending, Lindner calls for restraint and proposes a three-year moratorium on new social spending.
The SPD and the Greens immediately rejected this. On the other hand, the SPD and the Greens could imagine higher debts, for example by suspending the debt brake or at least reforming the instrument. Then Lindner and his FDP say: Not with us.
Interested in the failure of the traffic light coalition?
And yet the FDP leadership has appeared more constructive since the Epiphany Party conference in January. They want to score points with laws and economic growth that fit the FDP profile. “The FDP will not be successful if the traffic light is a failure” – this internally expressed assessment from the parliamentary group seems to be gaining widespread acceptance.
Anti-Green party bully and FDP deputy Wolfgang Kubicki has also become a little more objective. FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai recently spoke out in favor of a black-yellow alliance – obviously not agreed upon with Lindner. Wrong timing, clumsy – that’s how it was seen within the party.
The traffic light times in which Lindner consciously spoke of “spaces of opportunity” and “freedom energies” in a way that was compatible with the Green Party are long gone. Now he is concentrating on the “economic turnaround” that has to come – and in doing so is challenging both coalition partners and the Union.
But one thing is also clear: He needs Habeck first and foremost for all of this. The fate of the traffic light coalition will depend not only on the 2025 budget, but also on a unbroken and stable Habeck-Lindner axis in the second half of the legislative period. And with it possibly the fate of the FDP.
With information from Hans-Joachim Vieweger, ARD capital studio