As of: February 6, 2024, 6:52 p.m
By: Nail Akkoyun
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The FDP is losing ground and thousands have left the party.
If you ask the liberals, you will clearly hear a demand.
Berlin – The FDP is shrinking.
The Liberals have been losing members for years.
If you ask the party why, the answer you get is one demand: a return to the roots of liberal politics.
“Less wokeness and more fitness for the state are now necessary,” said Bundestag member Frank Schäffler to
merkur.de
from
Ippen.Media
.
The FDP must be a “progressive party that makes the fat welfare state competitive again”.
To achieve this, the profile must be “significantly” sharpened.
According to a party spokeswoman, the number of members at the turn of the year 2023/2024 was 71,820 - 4,280 fewer than in the previous year.
The FDP still had 76,100 members.
Among those who are turning their backs on the party is a former state party leader: Holger Zastrow, who led the Saxony FDP for twenty years.
He justified his decision to leave the FDP after 30 years with the course of the federal party and the parliamentary group, which he no longer wanted to support and justify.
“It’s no longer possible,” wrote Zastrow on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
Party leader Christian Lindner's speech at the farmers' demonstration in Berlin was "the lowest point in more than 30 years of the FDP for me," Zastrow wrote in his resignation statement, in which he also attacked the Greens violently.
Around the turn of the year, there was a revolt from the party base against the traffic light policy - an initiative forced a non-binding vote on a possible coalition break.
Ultimately, only a narrow majority of 52.24 percent voted to remain in the traffic light coalition.
Christian Lindner at the 74th Federal Party Conference of the FDP in April 2023. © Achille Abboud/Imago
FDP continues to fall in surveys: Liberals want to remain “true to their convictions”.
According to Matthias Nölke, who helped initiate the “End the traffic lights!” campaign, the survey is also a reason why thousands of members have left the party: “For most people it is frustration because of the traffic lights.
This has probably increased since the results of the member survey.”
However, Maximilian Funke-Kaiser, digital policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, sees no reason for concern in the decline in membership: “Fluctuations in membership numbers are fundamentally normal and no reason for alarmism,” said the Bundestag member from Augsburg in an interview with
merkur.de
.
Within the party, people remain “true to their beliefs” and are convinced that the trend can be “reversed.”
But the trend has been downward for the Liberals for some time now.
According to the latest survey results, the FDP would even miss out on entering the Bundestag.
Funke-Kaiser emphasizes that at the start of the traffic light government there was “a significant increase in members”, “which tapered off somewhat towards the middle of the legislative period”.
A party spokeswoman also pointed out that the number of members had increased by more than 7,800 over the past six years, despite the current declining numbers.
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Nevertheless, according to Funke-Kaiser, “it is of course a shame if members decide to take this step”.
And Frank Schäffler also said: “Losing long-standing members is not nice.”
Traffic light coalition: FDP and SPD lose members – Greens grow
The SPD is currently also noticing a similar decline in membership as the FDP.
As of December 31, 2023, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's party had 365,190 members, 14,671 fewer than a year earlier, as a party spokesman
told the
German Press Agency (dpa) .
The Tagesspiegel
had previously
reported on the decline in membership among the Social Democrats.
In the first two years of government of the traffic light coalition in 2022 and 2023, the SPD lost a total of more than 28,000 members.
While the SPD shares the suffering of its traffic light partner FDP, the Greens are happy about increased membership growth in the new year.
“We Greens have had over 2,600 members join our party since the beginning of January,” said the party’s federal political director, Emily Büning, to the
dpa
.
According to the party, this is a record number compared to an average of almost 700 entries per month in 2023.
There were recently similarly high numbers in the 2021 federal election campaign.
Participation in the traffic light government alone cannot explain the decline in membership of either the FDP or the SPD.
(nak)