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Chairman Lindner: Manuscripts have recently saved him from the depths of his punch lines
Photo: Jan Scheunert / ddp images / Jan Scheunert
It was one of the strangest appearances for the FDP in 2020: The outgoing General Secretary Linda Teuteberg, prematurely urged to resign by the party leader, decided not to give an official farewell speech at the Berlin Congress Hotel Estrel.
Instead, she spoke up in the general debate in order to position herself on a question of principle.
Teuteberg's speech lasted four minutes and 39 seconds, and the general secretary spoke more from the hearts of many delegates than her successor.
Others, however, then thought: It's good that she is gone.
In the past few days, Teuteberg said, she had read somewhere: Whoever wants to modernize the country must have a positive relationship with the modernization tendencies of our time.
"Somebody on Twitter" wrote it, she said - as if the author was someone who does not belong to the liberal family.
The author sat among the delegates.
It was her Bundestag colleague Konstantin Kuhle, left-wing liberal domestic politician and general secretary of the Lower Saxony FDP.
On the eve of the party congress, Kuhle had tweeted that he did not consider it a wise strategy to "act as a poor leper against the evil zeitgeist."
Then came the phrase about modernization.
"Yes, if there are real modernization tendencies," Teuteberg contradicted, without naming Kuhle.
"But at the moment there are also a whole host of tendencies that are not good for freedom in our zeitgeist, and we have to face them courageously." Cultural struggles, she said, can only exist "if you even recognize them as such and accepts «.
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