CHRISTIAN LINDNER can pull a crowd. On a scorching afternoon on June 19th hundreds of students at Frankfurt’s Goethe University crammed into a lecture hall to hear the sharp-suited leader of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) preach the liberal gospel: “The left is against freedom, as it might contradict economic parity! The right is against freedom, as it might contradict cultural parity!” After victories for “hate, exclusion and resentment” in the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump last year, he added to resounding cheers, liberalism’s retaliation is gathering pace.
The FDP is back. At the previous election in 2013, four years of coalition with the centre-right Union (the alliance of Angela Merkel’s CDU and the Bavarian CSU) had left the party looking indistinct and peripheral, cutting its vote-share from 14.6% to below the 5% needed to enter the Bundestag. Then Mr Lindner took over, imposing his personality—part-playboy, part-motivational speaker—on the party, distancing it from Mrs Merkel by taking a hawkish stance on refugees and the eurozone and simultaneously restyling it as an underdog fighting for economic and personal freedom. “The FDP has rediscovered its identity,” he proclaims.
In the past two months that strategy has come good. The party’s polling average has risen from around 5% to above 8%. It has entered state governments in Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia. By mid-May it had gained more members this year than in 2016. Yet as the FDP at last emerges from the slump prompted by its last coalition with the Union, commentators are now speculating that it might fall into another one after the federal election in September. Such is the party’s conundrum: it is too small to pretend it might lead a government, too close to the political centre to be innately distinctive.
One other party is in this bind. The chancellor’s decisions to end Germany’s use of nuclear power and let in over 1m refugees have sidelined the environmentalist, humanitarian Greens, who gathered in Berlin on June 16th to adopt a manifesto—and, less formally, debate why they have fallen from well over 10% in polls to around 7%. They decided to concentrate on eye-catching policies emphasising the party’s distance from the Union, like ending the use of coal power (which is rising thanks to Mrs Merkel’s nuclear gambit) and introducing gay marriage (which is opposed by her Christian Democratic base).
A particular spectre haunts both parties: a Jamaica coalition. Such a tripartite government, named after the black (Union), green (Green), and yellow (FDP) colours of that country’s flag, has just been formed in Schleswig-Holstein. The three are on track to win a Bundestag majority in September, thanks to the declining fortunes of the Social Democrats (SPD). After the SPD’s identity-sapping “grand coalition” with Mrs Merkel this term, it might prefer to go into opposition, leaving Jamaica as the only alternative. On June 17th Bild, Germany’s most-read newspaper, portrayed Mrs Merkel in dreadlocks.
There are plenty of objections. Mr Lindner’s scepticism of euro-zone integration, attacks on Mrs Merkel’s open-border policies and enthusiasm for tax cuts are toxic to the federalist, pro-refugee and economically leftish Greens. He calls their proposals “unrealistic and ideological”. Yet neither party rules it out. Katrin Göring-Eckardt, one of the Greens’ two (centrist) lead candidates, told her party on June 17th: “It’s not about with whom we govern, but for what.” Winfried Kretschmann, the party’s only state prime minister, has backed a deal with the Union. Some in Mrs Merkel’s inner circle are known to favour a Jamaica coalition over another turn with the SPD.
The chancellor has a knack for swiping territory from parties around her, particularly her coalition partners. Neither of the SPD’s two grand coalitions with her have ended well for the party, and the FDP’s spell at her side was disastrous: in 2013 it lost 2.1m votes to the Union and is only now starting to recover in the polls. To ride out the final years of Mrs Merkel’s chancellorship in opposition might look tempting to both parties. The greatest barrier—to Jamaica or even, if the numbers suffice, to a simple CDU/CSU-FDP coalition—is not ideology, but self-preservation.
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