Christian Lindner is not a man inclined to spontaneity. If he, the head of the FDP and federal finance minister, decides to speak for just under ninety minutes at the federal party conference, it’s not because he’s getting bogged down. It’s because he believes it’s necessary. Lindner has to calm the party down – he succeeds.
The Liberals have suffered defeat after defeat in recent months. In Saarland they once again failed to pass the five percent hurdle, in Lower Saxony and Berlin they were kicked out of parliament. It is a challenge in such a mood to hold an election party conference that doesn’t blow up in your face.
Lindner meets the challenge with a simple recipe: No comment. In the hour and a half, he simply doesn’t mention the electoral defeats. Instead, he talks about government actions, about difficult considerations, about where he sees the FDP in the party structure.
“We distance ourselves from those on the left who want to give instructions on how to behave, but also from those on the right like Markus Söder, who poisons against “woke madness,” he says, or: “Life with a combustion engine in the Thuringian Forest is no better or worse than life with a cargo bike in Prenzlauer Berg.”
Lindner emerges strengthened from the party conference
This is risky: it could appear as if he is evading responsibility. But it works. 88 percent of the delegates re-elect Lindner as boss. Lindner, who had to worry before the party conference that his FDP would blame him for the state election results or the traffic light alliance as such, emerged stronger from this rehearsal.
Valerie Hoehne has been in the capital city office of the Tagesspiegel since September 2022. She mainly reports on the FDP.
The calm of the speech, the conciliatory tone towards the Greens in particular, who has become the FDP’s favorite enemy in the coalition, is a contrast to the rough statements of the past few days, which were characterized by the dispute with the same Greens about the ban on installing new gas and gas systems Oil heating from 2024, part of the transition to climate-neutral heating for the country. What was there to read, from “scrapping orgies” that the FDP accused Minister of Economics Habeck to an “atomic bomb” that was the building energy law for the country.
Lindner is a man who has mastered the principles of rhetoric. If he decides to give a speech that at times seems almost boringly state-supporting, then that too is a conscious decision. On the one hand, he signals to the traffic light partners that he takes the coalition’s decisions seriously.
Lindner stays out of the directional dispute in the FDP
On the other hand, he is also about an internal party dispute about the orientation of the FDP. Some want the FDP to broaden their horizons and open up new milieus. In times of crisis, the others insist that they primarily want to serve their core clientele. Lindner himself does not want to bother himself with it. “We should not let ourselves be defined by whether we are for or against the ideas of others. We have good ideas of our own,” he says.
With this tactic he gets the best result of the entire national board. The FDP has learned from the past. When they were under pressure during the black-yellow government coalition from 2009 to 2013, they fell out publicly. They were kicked out of the Bundestag at the next federal election.
Recently there has always been speculation about who might succeed Lindner in the future. His election results aren’t the only thing that shows how little room there is for that at the moment. But also his clear stance on the post of chairman, which he has been for almost ten years: “Now you could say: After ten years, the FDP is in good shape. You could actually go now.”
But he says, “with all conviction”, that the task of creating a “modern, not left-wing Germany” has not yet been fulfilled. “We are only at the beginning together,” he says.
But how he defines this beginning, whether he has a vision for the FDP over the next ten years, this question remains unanswered. It would be worth it, he thought about it.
