According to surveys, the FDP tripled its electorate within a year.
Paradoxically, this is also due to the green zeitgeist.
A comment.
Munich - Hardly any other country is so alienated with liberalism as Germany, which believes in the state, and no party has been declared dead more often than the FDP.
Measured against this, the Liberals are currently experiencing a spectacular bloom: According to surveys, the number of their supporters has tripled within a year.
FDP leader Christian Lindner and his family can even dream of becoming the third strongest force in Germany at their digital election party conference four months before the general election.
FDP dreams of the podium: Liberals remembered their freedom DNA
This is astonishing, because the omens were bad: for a long time, the citizens of the FDP resented their rejection of the Jamaica coalition under Merkel, then the corona pandemic initially catapulted the polls of the ruling Union upwards, and at the same time the zeitgeist blew the Greens a lot of wind in the sails. But Lindner managed the feat of making both the virus and the climate his electoral supporters and shaping his party into a central actor in both of the political fields that dominated the election year:
While the Greens outbid Merkel's and Söder's lockdown policy in terms of severity and voted with the government in parliaments, the FDP remembered its freedom DNA and fought for civil rights without denying the danger of the virus like the AfD.
And now that Corona seems almost defeated, it is the growing fear of the Greens' climate policy rigor, including tax increases and climate lockdown, from which voters are seeking refuge in the FDP.
The liberals do not promise to save the climate with bans, but rather by unleashing the market forces for green investments through incentives.
Will party leader Lindner make it into the league of FDP icons?
With 93 percent, chairman Christian Lindner earned the deservedly good result in his re-election yesterday.
For the so far unfinished party leader, an election victory in autumn would offer the chance to rise to the league of FDP icons Genscher and Scheel - if he also manages to lead the Liberals back into government.
Whether this succeeds together with the Greens and the Union in a Jamaica alliance or with the Greens and the SPD in a traffic light, the FDP should in the end not care.
Lindner would certainly not allow himself to be asked again.
A comment by Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis
