Just a handful of members of Germany’s Free Democrats have expressed a desire to remain in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractured tripartite ruling coalition in a non-binding poll.
Members of the low-tax, business-minded party are unhappy with co-operation with Scholz’s socially-oriented Social Democrats and Greens. That has led to speculation that the coalition will not last beyond the two years left in its term.
On Monday, Bijan Djir-Sarai, secretary general of the FDP, said the result, with 52 per cent voting to remain, made it clear that the party wanted to continue governing. Party leader Christian Lindner is in the position of coalition finance minister. He told:
The overwhelming majority of members with a vote want the FDP to keep taking responsibility. The political challenges are enormous, in economic policy, in budgetary policy, but also migration … And we want the FDP to keep contributing.
Local and regional leaders launched the poll after the party was expelled from regional parliaments in Bavaria and Hessen after falling below the 5 per cent election vote threshold. The survey polled 26,000 of the party’s 76,000 members.
The FDP finds its fiscally orthodox prescriptions hard to implement in the face of the war in Ukraine, the loss of Russian gas and the need for an accelerated energy transition imposing unprecedented costs on Europe’s industrial powerhouse at a time of low or negative growth.
None of the coalition parties is interested in holding the early elections demanded by the opposition Conservatives. In tough economic times, polls show the Conservatives getting more than 30 per cent, double that of the SPD and the Greens. The FDP is holding around the 5 per cent mark nationally.
