For the FDP and the Greens, there is a different amount of tailwind from federal politics.
(Photo: IMAGO/Christian Spicker)
Berlin The result for the FDP was a low blow. In the Berlin party headquarters, the members couldn’t quite believe it on Sunday evening when the column also stopped at 5.3 percent in the ARD projection. A whopping minus of 7.3 percentage points after the 2017 state elections. The black-yellow government alliance thus has no chance of continuing. The Greens, on the other hand, are the winners of the elections. The eco-party got 18.1 percent, an increase of 11.9 percentage points compared to the last election.
As if the result had been foreseen, the FDP leadership in Berlin conducted corresponding expectations management shortly before the election. The state ministers Joachim Stamp and Andreas Pinkwart did an excellent job.
But a record result like in 2017 in the “small federal election” is no longer possible anyway, it said. At that time there would already have been a vote on whether the party should return to the Bundestag a few months later. “The mobilization of our own base in North Rhine-Westphalia was therefore enormous,” it said. But surely nobody had foreseen this crash. The liberal defense expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann spoke of a “horrific” evening.
Party leader Christian Lindner had previously left no stone unturned to achieve a good result in his home country. He put in a lot of effort in almost a dozen appearances. At the final of the election campaign on Saturday in Düsseldorf, he was accosted by disrupters as a “warmonger” and “liar”.
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The Federal Minister of Finance countered the troublemakers: “If you think you can upset me, you’re wrong.” On the election day itself, he tweeted about “a choice of direction: It’s about progress or regression – in economic policy, the Digitization and civil rights. ”Lindner guessed what was in store for him if the FDP did so badly.
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After the setback in the elections in Schleswig-Holstein, many liberals are now likely to be wondering whether the traffic light coalition in Berlin was the right decision or whether it would benefit the Greens in particular. In the past, they were the main political opponents when it came to third place in the political spectrum of opinion. Today they are coalition partners and must be treated with care.
Since the start of the traffic light coalition in Berlin, the Greens, in contrast to the Liberals, have achieved a solid and, by their standards, strong result in the last state elections in Saarland and Schleswig-Hostein. In Saarland, the Greens managed to get into the state parliament, but the FDP did not. In Schleswig-Holstein they came to 18.3 percent, the Liberals got stuck at 6.4 percent. In North Rhine-Westphalia, too, no government constellation – with the exception of an unlikely grand coalition – is possible without the Greens.
At the federal level, the soaring has been going on for quite a while. According to the polls, Ministers Robert Habeck, Annalena Baerbock and Cem Özdemir are the most popular politicians in Germany. Green issues are booming. Whether it’s the energy supply or the Ukraine war. Habeck and Baerbock fill the right foreign policy posts and hit the right tone in the opinion of the citizens. The SPD chancellor gives them the necessary leeway.
Significant need for discussion among the Liberals on Monday in the committees
At the FDP board meeting on Monday in Berlin, there should now be a considerable need for discussion. It is not for nothing that Finance Minister Lindner announced business-friendly policies and fewer state spending programs shortly before the state elections in order to strengthen the party’s profile. Even if Michael Theurer told the Handelsblatt that it was not the time to assign blame.
More on the subject of the NRW election:
The scandal on Friday in the Defense Committee will play a role when FDP politicians left the meeting while Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) was still speaking. The defense policy spokesman for the FDP initially complained loudly that Scholz only answered the questions of the committee members evasively. Apparently after pressure from the party leadership, he then apologized for his statements and offered to resign as spokesman.
The different positions of Strack-Zimmermann and the FDP ministers on the delivery of heavy weapons do the rest. Such differences should not have really helped the FDP. The request by Transport Minister Volker Wissing not to post photos of the meal on social media, which was later withdrawn, also falls into this category. The result was a shitstorm on Twitter, which many young voters must have registered.