Christian Lindner wants to examine himself – where is the FDP heading?

The FDP has to look for a new general secretary for the federal election campaign – and party leader Christian Lindner also wants to take another look at himself in view of the Liberal crisis. “Of course I had and must examine myself,” said Lindner on the ARD “Tagesthemen”. However, he remains convinced of his decision that leaving the traffic light coalition was the right thing to do due to a lack of policy change. That’s why he’s making his party “an offer to lead them into the federal election,” Lindner replied on ZDF’s “heute journal” when asked about a possible resignation.

Lindner called his party’s working paper published on Thursday by the FDP after previous media research, which described the Liberals’ possible exit from the coalition with military terms such as “D-Day” and “open field battle”, “stylistically unconvincing”. It was never discussed in political committees and he had no knowledge of it. But he doesn’t blame the employees who drafted the paper. “I bear overall responsibility for the FDP and I am committed to that.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) anticipated the FDP’s exit from the coalition with the SPD and the Greens by dismissing Lindner as finance minister at the beginning of November.

Former Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, who is considered a possible successor to General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai, who resigned on Friday, was already back in election campaign mode on Platform X: “Right now, a liberal party is more necessary than ever,” he wrote. You have to regain trust.

Another prominent representative of the party, MEP Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, wrote on When asked by WDR whether she was in favor of Lindner’s resignation, she replied: “No, I don’t know why.” The general secretary and the federal managing director of the party – Lindner’s ex-office manager Carsten Reymann, who has also since resigned – are responsible for the errors in dealing with the “D-Day” paper. The working paper called her “intellectually and linguistically simply subterranean.”

The FDP published the paper on the traffic light phase-out on its website. In particular, a diagram of the “D-Day process pyramid” with several stages ending with the “beginning of pitched battle” in “Phase IV” led to public outrage – and ridicule on social media. D-Day is usually associated with the Allied landings in Normandy during World War II.

According to several surveys, the FDP was already threatened with leaving parliament again before the affair after the planned new Bundestag election on February 23rd. The party had already failed to meet the five percent hurdle in 2013. Lindner then led her back into the Bundestag in 2017 and into the government with the SPD and the Greens in 2021. He has been party chairman for almost eleven years.

Watch the video above: Christian Lindner takes stock of the traffic lights and Scholz’s budget policy in his speech. It was a “calculated coalition break” and he sees no guilt.