The FDP deserves the downfall
On the morning of September 25, 2024, the Green Party leadership around Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang resigned. It is the right consequence after several disastrous results in the state elections. Where is the corresponding consequence for the FDP?
By Bent Erik Scholz
By Bent Erik Scholz
In Brandenburg, two of the three governing parties were recently thrown out of the state parliament with a bang - the fact that the third became the election winner is less due to the work of the federal SPD, but rather to the fact that Dietmar Woidke wisely distanced himself from Scholz and co. during the election campaign. Also not to be neglected: many voters said that they had voted for the SPD and CDU in order to prevent the AfD from winning the election. A vote for the lesser evil can only be considered a limited success.
The Greens suffered heavy losses in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. Only in Saxony did they manage to enter the state parliament by hook or by crook. It is the price to pay for a policy that threw its own principles overboard in order to maintain power, increasingly aimed at its clientele, and proved that - contrary to what right-wing wisecrackers like to claim - the Greens' policy has nothing left-wing about it. It is not social, it is not oriented towards the broad masses, it acts from a well-off bubble for the same. It is out of touch with reality.
And what about the FDP? For years, Christian Lindner in particular, as finance minister, has been driving the rest of the traffic light government ahead of him and, of all things as the weakest link in the three-party coalition, allows himself a great deal of hubris. He blocks investments, incites hatred against the lower middle class in order to pamper the top 10%. The outcry about the citizen's income is dishonest in view of the fact that the tax authorities lose an estimated 80 to 100 billion euros annually through tax evasion and tax advantages primarily for the super-rich. The middle income groups are paying the price for this. By comparison: the citizen's allowance costs the taxpayer just half of these 80 to 100 billion annually. Anyone who receives 600 euros a month as an unemployed person must put up with being insulted as a parasite. Anyone who inherits millions that they do not pay taxes on and does not work a single second longer than a citizen's allowance recipient will probably never be confronted with this accusation.
In all three state elections in recent weeks, the FDP not only failed to clear the five percent hurdle, but in two of the three state parliaments it achieved results that were no longer measurable. But it is not reacting by rethinking its internal structures. Instead, it is blaming its coalition partners, stomping its feet stubbornly, and letting Wolfgang Kubicki issue one ultimatum after another from the mothballs. Like a Chihuahua biting its calf, the FDP is fighting for the last shred of credibility. However, one looks in vain for self-criticism after these horrendous debacles. The problem with the FDP is not that it is not allowed to get its act together. The problem with it is that it blocks any effort to create a more balanced social policy, any support for poorer people, with an argument that essentially says that one cannot take less wealthy people into account because that would only scare away the rich.
Christian Lindner, whose political career began at 21, has never had a job in his life that would have advanced society. As a management consultant, he gave advice to already wealthy companies on how they could increase their wealth even further. Equipped with the almost clichéd archetypal insignia of the better-off yuppie - racing license, pleasure boat license, private jet - he presents himself as a representative of the people, although his politics show contempt for the overwhelming majority of the population. The company Moomax, which he founded, among others, went bankrupt after a year.
Wolfgang Kubicki, who flirted with the office of finance minister during the Jamaica negotiations in 2017, is representing the tax official Hanno Berger, a white-collar criminal who is considered the leading initiator of "Cum-Ex" deals. Hanno Berger alone is accused of tax evasion amounting to hundreds of millions. The German state lost around 10 billion euros through Cum-Ex. This money alone would have been enough to finance the 49-euro ticket for six years.
The FDP represents an unprecedentedly elitist, tendentially antisocial policy. Whenever it has been part of a government in this millennium, it has been thrown out of the Bundestag in the next legislative period. To blame this solely on the coalition partners is downright pathological. The truth is: the FDP has always been blamed for itsPolitical power came from young voters who voted not on the basis of their interests but on the basis of their wishes for their own lives. Young people who, if they make it to the top, can be sure that a party will be part of the government that will act in their interests. Four years later, these voters have come to their senses in the face of the disaster that neoliberal politics has meant in reality. Many a lost soul is still waiting longingly, but in vain, for the trickle-down effect.
The neoliberal fairy tale has come to an end. The greed for ever more growth, absurdly labelled as "freedom", is dying a painful but logical death. Anyone who leaves the regulation of the market to the market itself will experience first-hand how the right of the strongest brings about a dictatorship of monopolies in which nothing grows or prospers - social advancement is now a fever dream, the gap between rich and poor is widening more and more, and no one makes it from the very bottom to the very top unless they have inherited a fortune or are significantly more lucky than smart. The lie that those who work hard will get ahead has been exposed. Consistent neoliberal policy in its perfection means American conditions: people have to have two or three jobs at the same time in order to be able to pay their living expenses - and woe betide them if they get sick, because then they are hit by the disastrous alliance of loss of earnings and absurdly high hospital bills. In the United States, people fear for their existence because they have taken out student loans to further their education.
It is precisely this kind of policy that the FDP is propagating on the government bench. Decisions that it is forcing its coalition partners to make under the threat of dissolving the government. Not to mention the closeness to lobbyists, which is always glorified or denied, which leads to government politicians abusing the weight of their words in public debates to pamper companies. When an FDP politician speaks about his convictions on a talk show, he is merely giving a roundabout account of which interest groups he had dinner with the night before or which company he owns shares in.
If the FDP receives one percent of the vote in a state election, then it is reaching exactly the clientele it is there for. Because it does not represent the interests of 99% of the population. And Lindner, Kemmerich, Kubicki and their cronies can threaten and rant as much as they like: the consistent thing for the FDP would be not to dissolve the government coalition, but to dissolve the party. It is better to have no politics at all than to have the wrong politics.
09/26/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
The Greens suffered heavy losses in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. Only in Saxony did they manage to enter the state parliament by hook or by crook. It is the price to pay for a policy that threw its own principles overboard in order to maintain power, increasingly aimed at its clientele, and proved that - contrary to what right-wing wisecrackers like to claim - the Greens' policy has nothing left-wing about it. It is not social, it is not oriented towards the broad masses, it acts from a well-off bubble for the same. It is out of touch with reality.
And what about the FDP? For years, Christian Lindner in particular, as finance minister, has been driving the rest of the traffic light government ahead of him and, of all things as the weakest link in the three-party coalition, allows himself a great deal of hubris. He blocks investments, incites hatred against the lower middle class in order to pamper the top 10%. The outcry about the citizen's income is dishonest in view of the fact that the tax authorities lose an estimated 80 to 100 billion euros annually through tax evasion and tax advantages primarily for the super-rich. The middle income groups are paying the price for this. By comparison: the citizen's allowance costs the taxpayer just half of these 80 to 100 billion annually. Anyone who receives 600 euros a month as an unemployed person must put up with being insulted as a parasite. Anyone who inherits millions that they do not pay taxes on and does not work a single second longer than a citizen's allowance recipient will probably never be confronted with this accusation.
In all three state elections in recent weeks, the FDP not only failed to clear the five percent hurdle, but in two of the three state parliaments it achieved results that were no longer measurable. But it is not reacting by rethinking its internal structures. Instead, it is blaming its coalition partners, stomping its feet stubbornly, and letting Wolfgang Kubicki issue one ultimatum after another from the mothballs. Like a Chihuahua biting its calf, the FDP is fighting for the last shred of credibility. However, one looks in vain for self-criticism after these horrendous debacles. The problem with the FDP is not that it is not allowed to get its act together. The problem with it is that it blocks any effort to create a more balanced social policy, any support for poorer people, with an argument that essentially says that one cannot take less wealthy people into account because that would only scare away the rich.
Christian Lindner, whose political career began at 21, has never had a job in his life that would have advanced society. As a management consultant, he gave advice to already wealthy companies on how they could increase their wealth even further. Equipped with the almost clichéd archetypal insignia of the better-off yuppie - racing license, pleasure boat license, private jet - he presents himself as a representative of the people, although his politics show contempt for the overwhelming majority of the population. The company Moomax, which he founded, among others, went bankrupt after a year.
Wolfgang Kubicki, who flirted with the office of finance minister during the Jamaica negotiations in 2017, is representing the tax official Hanno Berger, a white-collar criminal who is considered the leading initiator of "Cum-Ex" deals. Hanno Berger alone is accused of tax evasion amounting to hundreds of millions. The German state lost around 10 billion euros through Cum-Ex. This money alone would have been enough to finance the 49-euro ticket for six years.
The FDP represents an unprecedentedly elitist, tendentially antisocial policy. Whenever it has been part of a government in this millennium, it has been thrown out of the Bundestag in the next legislative period. To blame this solely on the coalition partners is downright pathological. The truth is: the FDP has always been blamed for itsPolitical power came from young voters who voted not on the basis of their interests but on the basis of their wishes for their own lives. Young people who, if they make it to the top, can be sure that a party will be part of the government that will act in their interests. Four years later, these voters have come to their senses in the face of the disaster that neoliberal politics has meant in reality. Many a lost soul is still waiting longingly, but in vain, for the trickle-down effect.
The neoliberal fairy tale has come to an end. The greed for ever more growth, absurdly labelled as "freedom", is dying a painful but logical death. Anyone who leaves the regulation of the market to the market itself will experience first-hand how the right of the strongest brings about a dictatorship of monopolies in which nothing grows or prospers - social advancement is now a fever dream, the gap between rich and poor is widening more and more, and no one makes it from the very bottom to the very top unless they have inherited a fortune or are significantly more lucky than smart. The lie that those who work hard will get ahead has been exposed. Consistent neoliberal policy in its perfection means American conditions: people have to have two or three jobs at the same time in order to be able to pay their living expenses - and woe betide them if they get sick, because then they are hit by the disastrous alliance of loss of earnings and absurdly high hospital bills. In the United States, people fear for their existence because they have taken out student loans to further their education.
It is precisely this kind of policy that the FDP is propagating on the government bench. Decisions that it is forcing its coalition partners to make under the threat of dissolving the government. Not to mention the closeness to lobbyists, which is always glorified or denied, which leads to government politicians abusing the weight of their words in public debates to pamper companies. When an FDP politician speaks about his convictions on a talk show, he is merely giving a roundabout account of which interest groups he had dinner with the night before or which company he owns shares in.
If the FDP receives one percent of the vote in a state election, then it is reaching exactly the clientele it is there for. Because it does not represent the interests of 99% of the population. And Lindner, Kemmerich, Kubicki and their cronies can threaten and rant as much as they like: the consistent thing for the FDP would be not to dissolve the government coalition, but to dissolve the party. It is better to have no politics at all than to have the wrong politics.
09/26/24
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB
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