Where the FDP Failed

I. The Findings

In the federal election of February 2025 the Free Democratic Party received 4.3 per cent of the party-list vote. It is the worst result in the party's history. It missed the five-per-cent threshold and dropped out of the Bundestag — for the second time in twelve years. Christian Lindner, who had led the FDP since 2013, longer than Hans-Dietrich Genscher once did, did not even win a seat in his own constituency; there he took 4.9 per cent of the constituency vote. The day after the election he announced his withdrawal from active politics. He moved into business, onto the shareholder board of the recruitment company Stepstone.

A party that is thrown out of parliament twice in twelve years does not have a campaign problem. It has a problem of substance. The election result is the visible end of a process that began long before, and whose cause lies not in the 2025 campaign but in what the FDP made of itself over the years. Anyone who wants to understand the failure must begin at the surface — with what everyone saw — and then work down to what lies beneath it.

II. The Surface: the Staged Break

In November 2024 the so-called traffic-light coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP collapsed. A few weeks later it emerged that the FDP headquarters had not suffered the break but planned it. An eight-page strategy paper from the Hans-Dietrich-Genscher-Haus bore the title D-Day — Sequence Scenarios and Measures. It named an ideal moment for leaving the coalition and described the phases of the operation. The last phase was headed Beginning of the Open Field Battle. The party's federal managing director had drawn up the paper on 24 October 2024.

The military language was one thing. The other was the lie. On 18 November 2024, when the first reports about the paper surfaced, the then general secretary declared publicly that the term D-Day had not been used and that the insinuation was an outrage. Eleven days later, when the paper was available word for word, he resigned, together with the federal managing director. Lindner announced a review of the communication errors and regretted that they might have called the integrity of the party's motives into question.

This affair damaged the FDP in the election campaign. Around forty per cent of Germans saw the party as chiefly responsible for the government's failure. But the D-Day affair was not the cause of the failure. It was a symptom. A party that plans the break-up of a government it belongs to like a field battle and then denies the planning has a disturbed relationship with what a liberal party once stood for: openness, honesty, respect for the citizen to whom one can be expected to tell the truth. The affair showed what the FDP had become, but it did not explain it. The explanation lies deeper.

III. The Narrowing: Liberalism Turned into a Clientele

Liberalism is one of the great political ideas of the modern age. It is about the freedom of the individual against power — the power of the state, the church, the authorities, the apparatus. It is about civil rights, about the limitation of rule, about the dignity of the human being who is not a subject but a citizen. It is about freedom of thought, of speech, of belief, of earning a living. That is a great claim, and by its nature it applies to everyone, because freedom that applies only to some is not liberalism but privilege.

What the FDP made of this claim over decades is a narrowing. The freedom of the individual became the economic freedom of the better-off. The great liberal programme became tax cuts, the debt brake, relief for the self-employed professions and for entrepreneurs. The FDP became, in perception as in practice, the party of the upper income brackets. It spoke for the professions, for entrepreneurs, for high earners — and it was elected by them and not by the others.

That is not a problem of communication and not a problem of personnel. It is a structural problem, and it can be put in one sentence: a party that speaks for few is elected by few. As long as the FDP primarily serves the interests of a clientele, it will struggle around the five-per-cent threshold, because the clientele it speaks for is roughly of that size. It is not a question of effort. It is arithmetic. Whoever speaks for five per cent gets the votes of five per cent, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the mood of the day — and drops out when the mood of the day is bad.

It is worth recalling at this point the origin to which the FDP likes to appeal but which it has abandoned. Ludwig Erhard, the father of the social market economy, did not call his programme Prosperity for Entrepreneurs, nor Prosperity for High Achievers. He called it Prosperity for All (Wohlstand für alle). That was not a slogan but a statement of purpose: the market economy does not justify itself by making some people rich, but by raising general prosperity. The freedom of the market is not an end in itself and not a privilege of the successful, but a means to the prosperity of all. Erhard thought prosperity and freedom together, and he meant both for everyone, not for a clientele.

This is precisely the inheritance the FDP has squandered. It narrowed prosperity from the many to the few, and freedom from the great claim of civil rights to a slim economic relief. It turned an idea that applies to everyone into an interest that applies to some. And then it was surprised that only some voted for it.

IV. A Personal Experience

I write this section in the first person, because at this point I am not an observer but was a participant.

I joined the FDP in 2016. I was recruited by Christian Lindner, with whom I was in personal contact for a while. It was the phase of reconstruction after the first ejection from the Bundestag in 2013. Lindner brought the party back from nothing; in 2017 it re-entered parliament. I was a member in Bonn, later in Nuremberg, and for a while I believed that something was emerging here — a liberal force that was needed.

I left in 2021, shortly before the federal election, in the year in which the FDP entered government. The reason was simple, and I state it as I felt it: I could no longer bear the hot air. I do not mean Lindner's rhetorical talent, which is undeniable. I mean the growing gap between the brilliance of the speech and the emptiness of what was said. Things were phrased ever more elegantly and meant ever less. The language ran away from the substance. What had begun as a liberal renewal had become a performance in which form replaced substance.

My departure coincided with the moment the party came to power. That was no coincidence. I did not leave because the party was failing — it was at its peak then. I left because in the moment of success I heard what the voters would settle the bill for four years later. The FDP gained power and lost its substance in one and the same process. It entered a government in which it extracted for its clientele what was attainable — the debt brake held, major tax increases did not happen — and in doing so lost any claim to stand for more than that clientele. In the end it staged the break-up of this government as a field battle and was thrown out of parliament.

V. Lindner as Personification

Christian Lindner was not the cause of the failure, but he was its most complete embodiment. He shaped the FDP twice: once in the reconstruction after 2013, when his energy and talent brought the party back from nothing, and once in its decline, when the same qualities that had carried it during the rebuilding became a burden in success.

The FDP under Lindner was a one-man party. It was tailored to him, to his rhetoric, his appearances, his face on the posters. That works in opposition and in reconstruction, when a party needs a voice that is heard. It does not work in government, where a party has to show that it stands for something that reaches beyond the person of its leader. Lindner identified the FDP so closely with himself that in the end the party fell together with his personal failure. When he lost in his own constituency, the party lost the country.

The ending was telling. The day after the defeat Lindner announced his withdrawal from active politics. His last words as party leader, posted on the short-message service, were that the election had brought a defeat for the FDP, but hopefully a new beginning for Germany. It was as if the country had only been waiting for his departure in order to take off. A few months later he sat on the shareholder board of a recruitment company. The man who had lived from politics for almost 25 years and had identified the party with himself moved into business without any visible transition as soon as politics no longer carried him. That is no moral failing — everyone has the right to change profession. But it is an indication of what politics had been for him: a position, not a mission.

VI. What the Failure Means

The FDP is today an extra-parliamentary party. Its membership, still around 72,000 in 2023, stood at over 168,000 in 1990 — it has more than halved within a generation. Figures from the old guard are competing for Lindner's succession. A new statement of principles, it is said, is badly needed. The hope is to achieve better results again in the next state elections with new content and not to sink into oblivion.

This hope misjudges the situation. The FDP's problem is not that it lacks the right content, which would merely need to be reformulated. The problem is that it has narrowed the liberal idea to a clientele interest, and that no reformulation of this interest will turn it into an offer for everyone. As long as the FDP wants to remain the party of the upper income brackets and at the same time wishes to become a broad-based people's party, it will fail on this contradiction, because one cannot speak for few and be elected by many.

And yet the failure of the FDP is not the end of liberalism. On the contrary, it is the precondition for rethinking it. Germany needs a strong liberal force — more urgently than ever, at a time when the freedom of the individual is under pressure from many sides: from the surveilling state, from the patronising apparatus, from the anonymous structures that determine citizens' lives without anyone being able to name who is responsible. The FDP in its present form cannot be this liberal force. But the idea it betrayed has not fallen with it. It is waiting to be freed from its narrowing — and to be led back to Erhard's inheritance, which the FDP abandoned: prosperity and freedom, both together, both for all.

What such a force might look like, what its programme would be and how it would differ from the failed FDP is the subject of a second part. This first part had only the task of stating the findings: the FDP did not fail because of an election campaign, not because of an affair, not because of a person. It failed because of a narrowing that it carried out itself — and that, as long as it clings to it, will make it fail again and again.