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FDP election poster in Berlin, August 2021
Photo: JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP
The fact that I can still experience that: The liberals are suddenly really in demand, and without them not much is possible, actually nothing at all, if the current status of the polls is to remain.
It shows one of the very few good sides of the merciless leveling of the party landscape: with ten to twelve percent of the votes you no longer look like the majority-creating appendage of a three times larger people's party, but like one of (almost) equals.
But: you shouldn't break your feet while walking upright or, worse, stay rigid for fear of your own courage. After the big RTL triumph on Sunday, the race for the Chancellery is surprisingly still a three-way battle. But none of the three would get into the Chancellery without the FDP. For Olaf Scholz and Armin Laschet in particular, the FDP is the new yellow danger - if it joins the other. There is no better way for the Liberals. Actually.
But what does the party leader do? He never tires of declaring traffic lights with the SPD and Greens everywhere to be downright the devil and chaining himself to the CDU. This is, of course, based on an early misjudgment, which Christian Lindner was not alone in. "I believe that in truth the question of black or green in the Chancellery has been decided in favor of the CDU / CSU," said the FDP leader a few weeks ago. Well: The duel in the trial is now that between black and red, which is why it would be time to readjust your own arguments.
I understand that the FDP boss would have a hard time with a green traffic light. Apparently there are confirmed opinion polls that three quarters and more of all FDP supporters would then turn in horror. Maybe it is so. An SPD / Scholz-led traffic light, on the other hand, is something else and not so easy to demonize with reference to Saskia Esken or Kevin Kühnert. After all, every party has a Saskia Esken, at the FDP it's just called Wolfgang Kubicki. You always buy the fool's edge when it comes to coalitions,
face it
.
And: If Christian Lindner justifies a traffic light with the cultural difference to the Greens and the SPD, he can hardly ask the Greens in the same breath to forget their cultural reservations and to form a coalition with the CDU / CSU and FDP. Someone will have to jump over their own shadow, I suppose. But why it should be the others needs a better argument than: Because we won't. That lacks two civic virtues, reason and fairness.
Further
de facto
ruling out
a traffic light
thus cemented a public expectation of the FDP, which in the end becomes more difficult and (politically) expensive to break every day. And the way things are at the moment, the next question will be: Will the CDU and FDP get the Greens on board - or will the SPD and Greens get the FDP on board?
If it is mathematically enough for a Red-Red-Green majority at the same time, the situation for Lindner will be completely precarious. Then he can either send the country on a journey into economic and foreign policy madness or join the said traffic light coalition as the voice of reason. If he chooses the former - he says no to governance again - then he has voluntarily helped his middle-class, family-run core clientele over the neck-breaking wealth tax that is in the election programs of the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party. One will repay him angrily. Even for the sentence from four years ago - 'better not to govern than to govern wrongly' - the FDP chairman has had to justify himself to his people every single day since then.The material consequences of the no at that time were not all that dramatic. How different it would be if Lindner paved the way for a veritable left-wing government. No trauma therapy could ever cure this.
Actually, the situation of the FDP is extremely comfortable. That it still seems overwhelmed is surprising, because it could build on its own experiences from the 70s, 80s and 90s - or have these parts of the collective party memory been erased in the meantime? Back then, the SPD and CDU / CSU faced each other in the election campaigns just as they do today, only they were significantly larger. After the interim era of the grand coalitions, bipolar relationships seem to have been restored for the time being. However, every Pole now needs two majority procurers, the names are FDP and Greens. We will all have to get used to triple coalitions, the whole thing will certainly not be more stable and the common denominator could be too small for the problems that are pending.
But what the heck: If the current polls actually anticipate the election result of September 26th, then we will see a black or red winner, but the parties in third and fourth place will be the actual winners. The FDP in particular should begin to behave like this. In the past, the liberals could also count.
