This fall in political Berlin, all eyes are on Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who is also the leader of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).
Lindner has made no secret of his party’s deep unhappiness with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ governing coalition, in which the FDP is the most junior of the three partners, together with Scholz’ center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. Almost from the beginning, the FDP has often behaved as the government’s internal opposition. Indeed, Lindner’s actions and that of his party have largely contributed to the Scholz government’s characteristic stop-go movements. And now, it seems to have broken down completely.
While the official next election day is almost a year away (September 28, 2025), most observers expect early elections next spring, after the FDP has left the government. This expectation has been fed by Lindner in particular. He has spoken of a “fall of decisions” and has openly speculated about an early end.
“Stability is of outstanding importance for Germany,” he told the podcast of Table.Briefings, a newsletter-based news provider, on October 3. “At some point, however, a government can became itself part of the problem.” Two weeks earlier, after his party had lost its third regional election in a row in the former East Germany (the FDP is no longer represented in the regional parliaments of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg), Lindner spoke of the “courage” his party needed to continue in government, should it prove able to enact polices that “are good for the country,” or else use that courage “to spark a new dynamic.”
A Tricky Step
For the FDP, entering the “traffic light coalition” (co-called because of the parties’ colors red, green, and yellow) was always tricky politically, but the only way to facilitate political change after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year reign. The party entered into it on the basis of two conditions: no tax rises and a return to the “debt brake,” which limits new debt to 0.15 percent of GDP. (The “debt brake” had been suspended since 2020 because of the COVID-19 crisis.) Lindner becoming finance minister was also part of the deal. The idea: His “fiscal rectitude” would keep FDP voters on board who were unhappy with their party enabling a leftwing government.
The SPD and the Greens agreed to these demands in December 2021. Three months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin created a “new world” (Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, also of the Greens) by launching his brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On February 27, 2022, when many still assumed the Russians would take Kyiv within days, Scholz coined the term “Zeitenwende” to describe what had happened: A watershed moment had taken place, the dawn of a new era in which old assumptions and policies now longer apply.
Missing the “Whatever it Takes” Moment
And it’s tempting to envision a Linder counter-factual at that point:
The 45-year-old would have risen to the occasion, turning into the financial enabler of Germany’s and Europe’s powerful reaction to the “Zeitenwende.” Lindner would have thrown his many old dogmas from the 1990s overboard and pulled out all stops to do “whatever it takes” to make sure Putin’s criminal attempt at changing European borders by military force would not stand—organizing long-term, reliable, international financing for Ukraine under attack, facilitating a step-change in Germany’s long-neglected budget for its armed forces, and pushing for the European Union to use its considerable possibilities to finance the “strengthening of NATO’s European pillar” on a large scale, including by common debt issuance.
That’s not what happened, though. Instead, Lindner reportedly told Ukraine’s then ambassador, Andriy Melnyk, soon after Russia’s attack that it was better for Ukraine “to face facts,” adding: “You’ve only got a few hours left.” (Lindner later had a hard time refuting the quote and explaining that this did not amount to appeasement.) And to finance increased German defense expenditure, at least for a few years, Lindner was passed on an idea that Scholz, as Merkel’s last finance minister, had already in his drawer: creating a “special fund” (“Sondervermögen”) worth €100 billion for the Bundeswehr, outside the regular budget. The concept was originally prepared in case the United States would become too insistent on Germany meeting the NATO goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, promised in 2014.
And that’s that. On the European stage, Lindner’s (and Scholz’) opposition have rendered the EU so far incapable of exploring new ways of financing its defense needs, while the struggle to help Ukraine militarily and financially is also obstructed by Hungary and its pro-Putin leader, Viktor Orbán. In Germany, the FDP—and a 2023 ruling by the Constitutional Court—have made sure that the federal government’s expenditure is more and more constrained. No matter than Germany’s economy, after a 0.3 percent recession in 2023, will likely shrink once more this year by 0.2 percent and even the influential business lobby BDI, not known for state-socialist tendencies, is calling for greater state investments in Germany’s crumbling infrastructure.
The “debt brake”-compatible 2025 budget, hard fought over by Scholz, Robert Habeck, the vice-chancellor as well as economy and climate minister of the Greens, and Lindner during the summer, is currently in parliament. It includes inter alia devastating “across-the board” cuts at the foreign office and the development ministry, undermining Germany’s ability to act internationally at a crucial moment in time. Direct help for Ukraine, doubled in 2024 to €8 billion in the budget, has been slashed by half again. The Bundewehr’s (slow) improvement is still only financed by the monies from the “special fund,” with the regular defense budget seeing next to no increases.
Playing a Role
All this suggests that Lindner is not only out of his depth, but is really just playing a role: that of an ideologically blind, fiscally hawkish German finance minister. That may not be a surprise. When young, Lindner already was “a suit guy,” enjoying himself in the role of a “young urban professional” and businessman. There is hilarious TV footage of him as an 18-year-old who, after finishing his final year school lessons, gets into a hired dark limousine to sell “PR concepts” to unsuspecting companies in and around Wermelskirchen, a small West German town northeast of Cologne. However, his business record is mixed, at best, and he became a professional politician at the age of 21.
He became party leader a decade later, in 2013, when the FDP was voted out of parliament after a disastrous spell in government with Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU, and then helped it to achieve its re-entry into the Bundestag in the 2017 election. Merkel then tried to build a coalition with Lindner’s FDP and the Greens (a so-called “Jamaica coalition”), but Lindner caused the negotiations to break down, arguing that it was “better not to govern than to govern in the wrong way.”
He may well say the same thing again soon, facilitating an early end of the Scholz government and new elections in spring 2025. However, by his actions Lindner has maneuvered himself and his party into a situation in which the FDP will likely be blamed by voters rather than praised; the party is already polling below the 5-percent threshold to enter the Bundestag. The FPD taking another break from national politics by being voted out of parliament, however, would present a chance to break out of outdated policies and a good thing Germany’s fiscal, economic, and indeed foreign and security policy. For the country and the EU, it will already be hard enough to make up for the lost Lindner years.
Henning Hoff is Executive Editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
