In 2013, they were at the end. Voted out of office. Germany’s smallest powerful party, the FDP, had to leave the Bundestag. Programmatically, staff and funds were done by the liberals. However, they have recovered – and how!
It is the color. They are different than in the past. For decades, the liberal blue-and-yellow came to the, now bright red, purple, turquoise and a high-pitched pink eye lure. The election posters of the FDP are the only eye-catcher in the election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia. Everything else is stuffy to “already seen”. Always in focus: Christian Lindner, the country Manager and the Federal Chairman. The 38-Year-old the personalized FDP reloaded. A young star, a, of the four years of parliamentary abstinence in Berlin to finish. And that somehow is just above the Five-percent-hurdle, no, two digits it should be. And the chances are currently good.
The nice, young Mr. Lindner
Because Lindner. The man with the short blond hair and the occasional three-day beard had the best chances in the competition “Germany searches for the Super-son-in-law”. Easy bubihaft in the appearance of the studied political scientist is not in fact, but a brilliant orator – which deny him, even his political opponents. His trademark is the free lecture without a lectern and microphone in Hand. An hour and more he works, the stitch points, which he keeps on a post card, small piece of paper in Hand. In the case of the punchlines he rises slightly on his toes. Unlike his now deceased predecessor, Guido Westerwelle, Lindner comes easily.
FDP-alpha animals: Wolfgang Kubicki (right) and Christian Lindner on election Sunday (8. May) in Kiel
He is regarded as an Achiever, as one, the everything goes easy from the Hand. Even as a high school student, he was working freelance. His future Internet company went bankrupt. The millions of credit from public funds, he had to pay back. On the early entrepreneurial period, the media now report remarkably little. Instead, he is since 2013, the Zero hour of the liberal, benevolent appreciated, at times anthemic as the Savior of German liberalism celebrated.
Lindner’s Start as a top Liberal offered little perspective. Almost everything was in tatters: the staff, the funds are consumed, the empty, the program failed. He had no Chance, but he took advantage of you. He was young enough to be not as a legacy of the rotten FDP discredited. He was free. In Düsseldorf in the Opposition and in Berlin not only in the Parliament, he was especially in the wind shadow of higher media attention. The FDP could do virtually nothing wrong. These are the best prerequisites for a silent restart.
When the FDP was still as a lawyer and a dentist party
The old FDP was mainly a clientele party. Doctors and pharmacists, Hoteliers and medium-sized companies were the liberals to a small, but solid size of the page of the CDU – a little less long as a Junior partner of the SPD. Always eager to prevent too many bans for the market and to keep the taxes for freelancers and employers small. So understood, liberalism culminated at some point in the mid-1990s, the label “party of the better-off”.
The Elite in the FDP was to attack surface. The social Democrats and the Green were able to again and again encounter in the self-created open flank. The Image of the FDP took damage. But nothing has hurt the liberals in society than the reputation of being a cold capitalist party, which programmatically didn’t have any more to offer than tax cuts for the Rich.
Political Parliament was a grandfather and grandson: Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the face of the FDP, as they are still Aryan.
In this generalized statement of allegation was not justified for sure, but the memory of the political bogeyman-time seems to be still fresh. As the Federal party Congress at the beginning of the month in which the application was made to the prescription mail order drugs ban to protect the local pharmacist, was danger in delay. Lindner smelled the self-imposed trap. It was politically dead, he warned his party if the FDP run now and again clientele policy.
The sat expanded the pharmacist. The liberals will be with such adjustments to the old self-understanding of one or the other freelancers at the ballot box on may 14. May in North Rhine-Westphalia, and in September of the election, losing, however, the crucial question of the small party is: How and with what I am speaking of the middle of society? The New at Lindner-FDP objectives in any case, the widening of its Policy.
A symbol of the digital FDP, Christian Lindner, the New power of the liberal modern
Your racer of yesteryear, the persistent call for tax relief, which never came, is now formulated in light air. Instead, the also classic liberal areas of policy formation, free competition and the digitization of the back to the front again. Add in a dash of Patriotism. Lindner had criticised Merkel’s refugee policy from the beginning. Not in principle, but who comes into the country, should be able to identify themselves.
Again, ripe for a coalition: but with whom?
The question is no longer whether the FDP will be the voters in Düsseldorf and at the Federal level is successful, but how much. And With whom it is a coalition? The peaceful policy conditions from the time of the Three – or Four-party parliaments is over. The cake of the voters votes will be divided between five or six parties. That makes three covenants needed. However, with the SPD and the Green of a traffic light coalition – don’t want the liberals in Berlin. In the case of a Jamaican Pact between the CDU, FDP and the Green, across the latter. However, Excluding the political three-way marriages is dangerous, it promotes the unloved Grand coalition.
If it is, is Christian Lindner also have the to. He is the Christiano Ronaldo of the FDP, wrote recently in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The Ball on the penalty spot, he must deliver. The conditions are optimal. The current national trend predicted, the Lindner-FDP for the Bundestag election in the autumn of eight percent of the votes.