Another unhappy new year looms for Germany’s ruling liberals

When Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) gathered for its traditional Epiphany gathering on Friday, no one dared mention aloud its one-time marching orders: better not to govern than govern badly.

That was how FDP leader Christian Lindner justified walking out of coalition talks with Angela Merkel in 2017. Five years later, after a year in power in Berlin, many of his party wonder if it should be governing at all.

Down nearly five points on its September 2021 result, the FDP, as the smallest cog in Berlin’s three-way coalition, has been consistently overshadowed in office by its political partners – and squeezed by events.

The Social Democrat Party (SPD) and Greens have pushed ahead with pet projects, from welfare reform to legalised cannabis. But Russia’s attack on Ukraine has forced Lindner out of his comfort zone as federal finance minister, signing off on emergency budgets at odds with FDP’s small-state beliefs: €100 billion for defence, €200 billion for anti-inflation measures and €1.5 billion annually to co-fund a €49 monthly national train ticket.

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Traditional FDP voters – entrepreneurs, doctors and accountants – are still waiting for electoral promises to cut taxes and red tape. Their impatience tipped into frustration and a series of state election disasters last year, including ejection from one regional parliament.

With polls suggesting four further election drubbings this year, beginning next month in Berlin, Lindner told a Stuttgart audience on Friday that the ruling coalition in Berlin needed to change its approach.

“If this coalition wants a chance at being re-elected, it will only succeed if the country returns to an economic run of success,” he said. “The FDP isn’t here to make proposals to suit the Greens, but to suit reality.”

The FDP is divided along lines previously reserved for the Greens: a pragmatic “realo” grouping around Lindner and his cabinet ministers and a smaller, more ideological or “fundi” grouping that feels neglected.

The latter published a list of demands in advance of the gathering, demanding more clear FDP policy in government: swift tax cuts, a return to a constitutional debt brake set aside in the pandemic, and “pushback against capitalism-hostile climate ideology that shamelessly pushes Germany’s de-industrialisation”.

With an eye on gains among Germany’s opposition conservatives and far right, FDP “fundis” are also demanding a tougher stance on “illegal migration” and migration “into the labour market and not the welfare state”.

Echoing some of these points in his address, Lindner was interrupted briefly by activists who unfurled a banner reading “climate collapse” while singing We Shall Overcome.

At the Stuttgart gathering, the party’s rank and file urged leaders to overcome their political slide, with local member Michael Baum telling ZDF television: “We have to be careful we don’t lose our liberal profile.”

For now at least Linder’s authority as leader is unquestioned – but that could change after further poll defeats, potentially rattling Berlin’s federal coalition.

“Among FDP clientele there is a dominant impression that the party is simply in the coalition to make up the numbers for Red (SPD)-Green,” said Prof Uwe Jun, a political scientist at the University of Trier.