As of: March 1, 2024, 6:11 p.m
By: Bettina Menzel
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Although member surveys are non-binding, they have a signaling effect.
Now there is a new proposal in the FDP: In the future, more signatures will be needed to start a vote by the members.
Berlin - A member survey by the FDP recently showed only narrow support for the continuation of the traffic light coalition: 52.2 percent voted in favor, 47.8 percent wanted to end the alliance with the Greens and SPD.
At the upcoming federal party conference, the Liberals now want to decide on a higher hurdle for future surveys of this type.
So far, signatures from 500 members have been enough; in the future, according to the application, almost 2,000 signatures will be needed to initiate a vote.
FDP wants to raise the hurdle for member votes
The Liberals wrote the current minimum of 500 signatures into their statutes in 2015.
At a time when the party had 50,000 members, this corresponded to one percent, according to the application to change the statutes, which comes from members from several state associations.
“The party has now grown to over 72,000 members.
The 500 members set back then only correspond to around 0.69 percent of the membership today,” the applicants continued.
FDP delegates raise their voting cards at the European Party conference in Berlin (symbolic image).
© Imago/dts news agency
Now they want to require the approval of two and a half percent of the members for such a vote, which would currently correspond to around 1,800 signatures.
The party only wants to be asked about issues of fundamental importance.
The “currently very low quorum invites us to carry out significantly more member surveys on less important topics in the future, and thus weaken this important tool for intra-party debate,” argue the initiators.
It was said that by raising the hurdle, misuse would also be ruled out.
Discussion about a higher threshold also within the party
Unlike the membership decision, a member survey is not binding according to the FDP statutes.
But such a vote would still have “an important signaling effect,” the applicants believe.
Whether raising the quorum to two and a half percent is correct is now also being discussed within the party.
The proposal “gives the impression that a minority is being left out of future member surveys through a higher number of signatures,” criticized Thuringia’s FDP leader Thomas Kemmerich in an interview with
Spiegel
.
The Bundestag member Marcus Faber, on the other hand, said that he considered the threshold of 2.5 percent to be “appropriate”.
The state leader of the FDP in Saxony-Anhalt, Lydia Hüskens, warned that “participation formats should never be given up carelessly,” but then also put forward a counter-argument.
“Votes in which there is only yes or no also run the risk of excluding many positions that lie between the extremes,” said Hüskens.
At the end of April, the Liberals want to vote on increasing the threshold for member surveys at their federal party conference in Berlin.