Politics dropout Suding: “I have no regrets”

Electoral success in Hamburg, entry into the Bundestag, FDP vice-president: Katja Suding has had a short, steep political career. Now she is getting out. Why?

Friendly, sober, weighing every word – this is how Katja Suding talks about her departure from politics: “I have no regrets. And it will just go on. Just differently.”

The 45-year-old looks at her career in the FDP in her Berlin parliamentary office – and feels at ease with herself. She always wanted to be self-determined in politics and also to get out of it self-determined. She sees career policy as a temporary task, not a dream job.

It all started in Hamburg in 2011

Suding’s political life began around ten years ago in the north. “The FDP has made a fresh start in Hamburg. The mood is good,” she said after the FDP’s successful re-entry into the Hamburg citizenship in 2011.

Suding caused a sensation nationwide, not only in Hamburg as a liberal top candidate in the Friesennerz on election posters. Berlin received a lot of praise from the party leader at the time, Guido Westerwelle: “Above all, you notice that a new, very fresh team in Hamburg with Ms. Suding at the top is also stirring up Hamburg,” said Westerwelle in February 2011.

Suding then went up steeply: in 2015, she became Deputy Head of the Federal FDP. In 2017 she moved into the Bundestag and was very happy.

I’m incredibly excited about what’s to come in the next few weeks, months and years.

Four years in the Bundestag are enough for her

It was to be four years – just four years. For others, power seems to be a drug, for Suding it is over after an election period. It was a wonderful but difficult time. A time when Suding fought for her heart issue – digital education. The FDP politician tells of “friendly encounters”, even across party lines.

Just not with the AfD. Suding reported indignantly about misogynistic and racist comments that had come from the AfD parliamentary group, also in ongoing Bundestag sessions:

There is a lot of malice, a lot of devaluation of the political opponent. Things that one would never hear from other groups, despite all the political differences that may and must be.

Desire for more self-determination

Suding will certainly not miss such incidents. And she has long been looking ahead, to her life after politics. She wants to do something completely different again, something with “a little more self-determination, a little more independence”.

The spotlight doesn’t seem to be the most important thing for Suding. She was not present at her own adoption at the FDP federal party conference in May. She followed the tribute to party leader Christian Lindner via livestream.

This place up here, that would actually have been Katja Suding’s. But, it’s not a joke, she wrote to me this morning that her ICE was down.

Lindner also cited a liberal creed that everyone should be the pilot of their own life and not a passenger. They took that seriously, said Suding. And she assures that the male dominance in the FDP is not the reason for the withdrawal. In general, Suding doesn’t say a bad word in public:

Of course, this is a finish that I wished for or somehow imagined. And I am happy and grateful that it worked out so well and I just leave in complete peace.

Suding does not say what exactly she will do from autumn onwards. It will just go on. Just different.