Germany’s pro-business liberals risk death blow in regional vote

BERLIN —  Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, on the brink of political extinction, face a make-or-break state vote this Sunday that party leaders believe may well be their last chance to claw back relevance.

Leaders of the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) — which was part of Germany’s previous, ill-fated coalition government under former Chancellor Olaf Scholz — have long pinned their hopes for a national revival on this Sunday’s election in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, traditionally one of the party’s strongholds.

Instead, the vote now may end up being a death knell for a party that long played a central role in postwar German politics, wielding outsized influence as a kingmaker between the two major centrist parties that once dominated the political landscape.

With the FDP now hovering just above the 5 percent threshold of support needed to make it into the Baden-Württemberg legislature, according to polls, the party is at risk of crashing out of the state parliament for the first time in its history.

That result would prove disastrous for a party that already failed to make it into the federal parliament in a snap national election last year, an outcome that sent then party leader, Christian Lindner — once deemed a wunderkind of European free-market liberalism — into early political retirement.

In an unmistakable symbol of the party’s decline, Lindner, who served as finance minister in the previous government under Scholz, has since taken on a key management role at a national car dealership business.

The FDP’s prospects of turning things around with a resurgence in Baden-Württemberg are looking next to impossible. Current polls show it losing almost half of its support in the state since the last election there, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives maintain a small lead in the state over the second-place Greens.

“If we fail to enter parliament in Baden-Württemberg, it would be hard to explain why it would be different elsewhere,” Wolfgang Kubicki, the party’s deputy national leader, told POLITICO.

Disappearing center

The FDP’s decline can be seen as part of a larger hollowing-out of the political middle ground in Germany that is likely to be evident in numerous state and local elections set to take place this year across the country.

This Sunday’s vote in Baden-Württemberg — a state of some 11 million people and the cradle of Germany’s increasingly troubled auto industry — is the first in a series of five state votes seen as key tests of the national mood, particularly as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) vies for first place in many national polls.

For most of Germany’s postwar history, national elections have been dominated by either the the center-right Christian Democrats or the center-left Social Democrats, with the FDP choosing at varying times to form coalition governments with both of these parties. It served as a junior coalition partner in 18 out of 25 federal governments since the founding of West Germany.

As parties on Germany’s political fringes, including the AfD, have risen in popularity across Germany, the pro-business FDP has been particularly hard hit, seeing its support collapse to just 3 percent in national polls.

The FDP’s new leader, Christian Dürr, is trying to revive the party’s fortunes with a policy platform he refers to as “radical centrism.” | Bernd Weißbrod/picture alliance via Getty Images

Yet other classical liberal parties across Europe — which fuse market-oriented policies with libertarianism on social issues — have performed far better.

In the Netherlands, Rob Jetten and his liberal-progressive D66 party came in first in a national election in October, edging out Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). In Austria, the liberal NEOS take part in a three-party coalition with the conservatives and the Social Democrats. In Denmark, both the Venstre party and Liberal Alliance have maintained stable support for years, and are each polling at roughly 10 percent.

Germany’s FDP, however, has been punished by German voters for their role in bringing down the previous, three-party government under Scholz. The party never recovered after details of its “D-Day” plot to blow up the coalition emerged in 2024.

In the snap election that followed the Scholz government’s collapse, FDP voters defected in droves to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc as well as to the AfD. A similar trend can now be seen in Baden-Württemberg. While the FDP in the state has seen its support plummet, the conservatives boast a moderate increase in support.

At the same time the AfD has nearly doubled its support in the state compared with the last election, according to polls, and may emerge as the clearest winner on Sunday in terms of vote share gained.

‘Radical centrism’

The FDP’s new leader, Christian Dürr, is trying to revive the party’s fortunes with a policy platform he refers to as “radical centrism,” though the specifics of that agenda remain vague.

“People expect real reform policy,” Dürr told POLITICO. “What drives them mad is that all debates are overlaid with ideology. They expect rational politics in the center.”

The party says it wants to implement market-friendly reforms to boost Germany’s economy, including by easing access to the labor market for skilled migrants and reforming the state pension system to allow contributions to be invested in equity markets.

These positions, however, don’t necessarily strike many voters as particularly fresh — nor sweeping enough to reverse Germany’s manufacturing decline. In Baden-Württemberg, it’s the car industry that has been particularly affected. Overall, around 100,000 positions or around 8 percent of jobs in the car sector are expected to disappear by 2030 in Germany, according to a 2025 study carried out for the economy ministry in Berlin.

The FDP’s biggest problem is that voters’ have lost trust in the party’s ability to rectify this.

“What’s really dramatic is that the economy has been a major, important issue — not only during the federal election — and now the FDP has very poor competence ratings in that area,” said Simon Franzmann, a political scientist at the University of Göttingen.

As economic worries grow in the state, anxious voters are increasingly drawn not to the FDP’s “radical centrism,” it seems, but to other centrist parties — or the AfD’s plain radicalism.

That’s just another reason the FDP, a fixture of German postwar politics, may well be on its last gasps.

For transparency: The author of this article briefly worked for a FDP lawmaker in 2024.