DThe FDP has to downsize again. After the election defeat in Lower Saxony, she is missing a parliamentary group. That’s eleven MEPs, with at least twice as many employees, a lot of advertising material and a great deal of public attention. In Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, the FDP’s losses weighed even more heavily. Although it retained small factions in the state parliaments, it lost the departments and heads of state ministries, their senior staff and their public presence.
After the defeat in Lower Saxony, the FDP federal chairman and federal finance minister Christian Lindner briefly gave the impression that it was simply a price of government that his party was weakening in the federal states. Sure, it’s a well-known mechanism that annoyance with members of the federal government is accounted for in state elections. But there are more striking reasons for the FDP’s dilemma, some that it is faced with without its doing and some that it has created itself.
Advertising for self-responsibility
The Russian attack on Ukraine is the determining external factor. In Germany, too, it created a climate of war that feeds collective feelings of fear and threats. In such a situation, it is more difficult for a party that focuses on the freedom and self-responsibility of the individual to promote itself. This is especially true when it governs with two parties that tend to cling to collective views of society. And it is even more true when the head of the Free Democrats sees it as a reason to be the first to rip a collective fire extinguisher (tank discount) out of the wall in order to forestall state support ideas of his coalition partners.
This maneuver ended as such maneuvers always end in coalition governments: the unifying compromise is that everyone can spend more money on their clientele. A federal finance minister who wants to build his reputation on sound budgeting should not set this mechanism in motion.
A major internal reason for the acute weakness of the FDP lies in the nature of its fall and resurgence over the past decade. The young development hero Christian Lindner placed his fresher, more agile and image-conscious party next to the ruins of the old FDP dignitaries, far away from the clichés of the academic regulars’ tables where doctors, pharmacists and school teachers gathered in the picture-perfect province in the evenings.
Many voters switched to the AfD
In the four years of the extra-parliamentary desert, almost 50 percent of the supporters who followed Lindner as party members changed. Since then, the number of members of the FDP has risen to a new record (around 77,000), but the member milieu and the membership loyalty have tended to weaken. According to the measurements of voter migration in Lower Saxony, the FDP lost 40,000 votes to the AfD, 25,000 to the CDU – many of them must have been sympathizers of the “old” Free Democrats.
After the defeats in the spring, the FDP leadership set up a commission to bring together old and young in the party more closely. Now there will be another commission which – according to Chairman Lindner – has to devote itself “planned and with good nerves” to the external appearance of the party. So is the message: “rest on the ship”?
More likely yes. On the day after the election debacle, Lindner made it clear that he definitely wanted to continue the election campaign against the Greens about the temporary continued use of nuclear power, but otherwise everything in the party and coalition should remain as it is in this time of war crisis. In this attitude, too, an experience from the times of the decline of the FDP a decade ago continues to have an effect. Back then, frantic personnel and position changes accelerated rather than halted the party’s decline in reputation, so now the opposite should apply.
So the course should stay the same, but the FDP’s “position lights” should shine brighter, as their captain now found. This is a job that is aimed first and foremost at his team, not only at the navigators at party headquarters, but also at the deck officers in the government departments. Beyond all crisis management, what about the digitization of public services, faster internet connections, the training offensive for practical professions, intelligent transport networks? Better not to govern than to govern badly – with this former justification for refusing government responsibility, the FDP has set a standard for itself.
