No German party has governed for so long since the founding of the Federal Republic 75 years ago. Not even the two big ones, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, have participated in as many governments as the small liberal party that for almost half a century has been decisive in forming coalition majorities on the center-left and center-right.
But today the Free Democratic Party (FDP, by its German acronym) is mired in a deep crisis after causing the breakup of the government coalition and early elections in November. And, above all, after the press revealed, and later the party itself partially confirmed, the secret plans and machinations to bring down the tripartite party. The FDP, according to the polls, may be left out of the next federal Parliament by not reaching the threshold of 5% of votes in the February 23 elections.
“This is self-inflicted damage that undermines his electoral chances,” says Wolfgang Merkel, a political scientist at the Berlin Research Center for Social Sciences. If the FDP did not enter the Bundestag, the line of its current leader, the former Finance Minister Christian Lindner, would be disavowed, criticized for an operation that should have been Machiavellian and ended up being a botch. A champion of austerity at all costs in Germany, Lindner believes that his country would need to be inspired “a little” by the Argentine president, the anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, and the Trumpist tycoon Elon Musk.
The crisis had been brewing for months—in the three regional elections in September the FDP won between 0.8 and 1.1%—but the trigger was a journalistic revelation. On November 6, Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed Lindner and two other liberal ministers over fundamental disagreements over economic policy. The weekly Die Zeit and the diary Süddeutsche Zeitung They published a few days later that the FDP had been meticulously preparing, for weeks, to bring down the coalition of which this party was one of the three legs, along with the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the environmentalists.
‘Operation D-Day’
The D-Day Operation —as the plan was baptized— was hatched during a meeting on a Sunday at the end of September at the Villa Erlenkamp in Potsdam, near Berlin. The president of the United States, Harry Truman, lived in the same building during the Potsdam conference in which, together with Churchill and Stalin, they planned the post-world war in 1945.
An eight-page internal document—and which Lindner now claims to have known nothing about until it hit the media—detailed the strategy. “D-Day, scenarios and measures,” was titled the document, which anticipates the “exit [del Gobierno] for the middle of calendar week 45.” That is, between November 4 and 10, as it was. The strategy was to culminate in an “open battle” in the media to defend the decision.
It is true, as Lindner alleges, that the breakup of the coalition had been a possibility for months, and not only the liberals were preparing scenarios in case this happened. Scholz had signaled that patience with his finance minister was running out. No surprise in the fall of the traffic light coalition, the name it received because of the color of its members: red, green and yellow. Nobody misses her.
What the liberals are criticized for is the war terminology (the “D-Day”, the “battlefield”), which is especially sensitive in this country due to its history. They are accused of duplicity for having stated in public that there were options to save the coalition, while in private they orchestrated the breakup. “Everything indicates,” says Wolfgang Merkel, “that, with an attitude of trivial Machiavellianism, they have destroyed their own chances in the elections.”
The operation forced the resignation of Secretary General Bijan Djir-Sarai on Friday. And the pressure on Lindner increases. On Sunday, in an interview on the public broadcaster ARD, the liberal leader opened another front: “In Germany, although the comparison is complicated, we need to dare a little more to be Milei or Musk.” The expression is copied from that used by the social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt — “we must dare to have more democracy” — but when applied to Milei and Musk, the formula disconcerted many.
Lindner specified this Tuesday that neither Milei nor Musk are his models, but that Germany needs “a pinch of disruption, reformist enthusiasm and innovative force.” What was surprising in his statements is that the German liberal tradition, as the historian Thorsten Holzhauser explains in Die Zeithas little to do with the anarcho-capitalism of the Argentine president or the libertarianism of Silicon Valley, because the German is a liberalism of order that does not dispense with either the State or the social.
The FDP crisis, according to political scientist Merkel, is “existential” if it becomes an extra-parliamentary force. It already was between 2013 and 2017. And what would historical figures of German liberalism such as the great sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf or a minister of so many coalitions and a fundamental man in European politics like Hans-Dietrich Genscher say about the current situation?
The political scientist believes that Genscher, who broke with the Social Democrats in 1982 and caused the fall of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, would understand the FDP’s way of proceeding with Scholz, but would think: “It cannot be done in such an unserious manner.” Dahrendorf, as an intellectual who thought beyond the parties, would have another opinion: “I would say that this is one more step towards the loss of confidence in a democracy that is under pressure.”
