Christian Lindner and the FDP are still looking for the right path in the traffic light coalition. The task that is difficult to solve is: to govern and still make a mark.
With the FDP, it’s a bit like yellow phases at traffic lights: Should I rather brake and wait for green, or do I better avoid the annoying red phase at full throttle, but risk a speeding ticket? Because the decision is so difficult for them, Christian Lindner and the liberals do both with the traffic light: they brake, go full throttle and then start to skid.
To stay with this imagery: The FDP is a motorists’ party and that’s why Christian Lindner naturally wins the hearts of those present when he talks about his love for cars: “Life with a combustion engine in the Thuringian Forest is no better or worse than life with one cargo bike in Prenzlauer Berg,” he calls out to the delegates at the federal party conference in Berlin. And they react with cheers, applause and smiling faces. “We don’t judge lifestyles,” he says, daring a bit of a culture war.
At the end of this first day, the FDP delegates re-elect him as their party leader with 88 percent. And this despite the fact that the Liberals are no longer represented in 5 out of 16 state parliaments. The FDP also has to worry about its entry into the upcoming state elections in Bremen, Bavaria and Hesse. But Christian Lindner has just led this party back into the Bundestag after ignominious years outside of parliament. He won’t forget that here.
And yet you can feel it: the fear of being an all-in-all party. With the 88 percent for Lindner, the many votes that were not cast are not counted. Strictly speaking, only 79.5 percent voted for him.
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A dilemma remains for the free democrats: The success they have worked so hard to achieve is in danger of being quashed again in what they call the “progress coalition”, the traffic light with the Greens and the SPD. If the liberals distance themselves too much and start arguments, this only helps them to a limited extent. If they are too quiet, they threaten to drown. Because governing means making compromises, there is always a risk of disappointing one’s own electorate. Especially among those who would actually much rather govern with the Union again.
Coalition sucks
The FDP Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann is standing in a room next to the speaker’s platform. Portrait photos are being shot of him right now. “Christian Lindner has made the transition from secret opposition leader to obvious statesman,” he praised his party leader after hearing his speech. He believes that this feeling also applies to the mood of the delegates. “They are now also delegates of a governing party,” he tells T-Online.
Buschmann is expressing what the party needs to be about: arousing interest in these traffic lights, even among the former FDP voters who are migrating. The famous sentence by Christian Lindner came from the night after the Jamaica negotiations with Angela Merkel broke up: “It is better not to govern than to govern incorrectly.” Convincing people now that it is right to govern with the Greens and SPD instead is quite a challenge.
For Lindner, however, Marco Buschmann is one of these guarantors for the successful profiling of the FDP in the traffic light government: “It is thanks to our Federal Minister of Justice,” he praised in his speech the liberal success in relaxing the corona measures. It is always the state that has to justify when it restricts freedom. “The citizens don’t have to justify that.” Lindner wants to draw attention away from the compromises. To a place where governing means, above all, being able to shape things as an FDP.
The enemy is said to be black
All of this should obviously not be at the expense of the coalition partners. The Greens and especially the SPD are conspicuously spared by Lindner and the Liberals in Berlin. On the other hand, it is mainly distributed against the old coalition partners of the CDU and CSU. Maybe it’s because the Conservative electorate believes they can get more out of the Liberals than the Greens and Social Democrats. In any case, Lindner calls the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder a “big tree hugger” who constantly changes his political views. Its policy is not “Mia san mia”, but “I’m going crazy”.
