The FDP is on the way to sharpen its profile. She is in the process of correcting positions and reviving forgotten topics. Social, ecological and liberal, that’s a good mix. In the traffic light government, the SPD, Greens and FDP will change – and at the same time retain their identity. Because that’s the only way they can modernize the country.
In the FDP-led Federal Ministry of Justice, for example, work begins: Abolition of paragraph 219 a (advertising for abortion) and unjustified data storage, reform of the electoral law, introduction of a community of responsibility, defense of digital civil rights – that is liberal handwriting.
One thing, however, has not yet been settled: the party must clarify which understanding of freedom underlies its policy.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Mistrust of government intervention is a defining characteristic of the liberals. But that must not apply if protection cannot be dispensed with. Freedom has to go hand in hand with responsibility and have the common good in mind. The FDP did not always take this sufficiently into account when fighting the pandemic.
A distinction must be made between vaccinated and unvaccinated people
Now it is clearly changing its position. Serious individual restrictions on fundamental rights must be accepted when it comes to protecting life and health. That is one of the “ultimate goals” of our constitution.
The dead finally irretrievably lose their rights to freedom. Without countermeasures, especially vaccinations, there would be many more corona deaths. It is therefore essential to distinguish between those who have been vaccinated and those who have not been vaccinated.
We need the instrument of compulsory vaccination that is proportional to it. Leading representatives of the FDP see it that way. With one prominent exception: Vice-party leader Wolfgang Kubicki has long played down the risk of a pandemic – and with his one-sided interpretation of the concept of freedom, he contributes to putting life and health at risk.
He pretends to defend the human dignity of the unvaccinated. But she is not in danger at all. It is the unvaccinated who endanger the human dignity of everyone else – that is the opposite of responsible solidarity.
Kubicki goes into the field of demagogy when he claims that the majority society is practicing “revenge and retribution” on the unvaccinated. Revenge and retribution for what?
With such demagogic formulations, he addresses a milieu that has very different ideas in addition to opposition to vaccinations. I call for the FDP committees to clearly distance themselves from this stance.
The claim that the corona vaccines are dangerous ultimately contradicts all scientific findings. Incidentally, unvaccinated people can end their “disadvantage” immediately if they get vaccinated.
In other fields too, the liberals have to overcome their distrust of government intervention. For many years the FDP has criminally neglected environmental protection. Environmental protection was seen as a growth killer that restricts freedom – what a mistake! This error is all the more astonishing because the FDP in particular was the first German environmental party in the 1970s and laid the foundations for today’s environmental protection.
Liberal pursuit of social justice
There is no question that fighting the climate catastrophe requires rules that restrict freedom better today than tomorrow, including bans. The encroachments on freedom must be distributed fairly among the generations, demands the groundbreaking climate decision of the Federal Constitutional Court.
I hope that the traffic light government will help to revive the “social liberalism” that shaped the FDP in the 1970s with impressive representatives such as Werner Maihofer, Ralph Dahrendorf and Karl-Hermann Flach. The FDP of the “Freiburg Theses” from 1971 had people and their self-realization as their goal – linked to social responsibility and the pursuit of social justice.
“The fair share of the increase in wealth”, so it was said in the theses, “is the ultimate question of freedom.” Property was guaranteed, but it was seen in its “social obligation” prescribed by the Basic Law. The traffic light coalition agreement breathes the spirit of such a policy, as evidenced by the citizens’ money and the share pension, for example. So there are points of contact with the social-liberal policy of the 1970s.
The most important parallel between then and now: The Federal Republic urgently needs reforms. The traffic light must become a coalition of progress that vigorously ventilates our society.
This is how it was at the time, even after 20 years of CDU chancellorship. Much has changed since then. The binding effect of the popular parties is waning. Three-party coalitions are becoming the rule, and the FDP and the Greens have finally found a sensible cooperation.
The Greens are not always future-oriented
The legal scholar Christoph Möllers recently came out with the thesis that there are “now two liberal parties”, the left-liberal Greens and the more conservative FDP. These are the two wings of the one liberal project.
The Greens, according to Möllers, are primarily concerned with the long-term protection of freedom, while the FDP does not focus on the perspective “ought” but on the short-term “want”. But this role description is wrong: on the one hand, the FDP is not without prospects, on the other hand, the Greens are not always future-oriented.
Rather, another difference is decisive: the understanding of freedom. Freedom in responsibility for others is the guiding principle of their politics for liberals, while freedom ranks alongside other goals such as peace and sustainability for the Greens.
The Greens represent political goals that are acceptable from a liberal point of view. They too are committed to freedom and democracy. What they lack, however, is the liberal leitmotif. For the Greens, when in doubt, it is the state that creates freedom.
For liberals, freedom is first and foremost there. “We are born free to be free,” said the political theorist and publicist Hannah Arendt. Liberals subject decisions to a strict freedom assessment. Restrictions are only a last resort. The FDP now has the chance to sharpen its freedom profile.
The author: Gerhart Baum (FDP) is a lawyer and was Federal Minister of the Interior from 1978 to 1982.
More: How the FDP and the Greens are working on the socio-ecological market economy.