The hopes for the resurrection of the FDP – Germany’s liberal democratic party – rest on a 71-year-old man, Wolfgang Kubicki, the most recognizable face of German liberalism, elected a week ago as party leader during the federal congress. Age is not just a number: this is not a generational shift. After all, his main rival in the presidential race, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, is 68 years old. The fact that the revival of a party repeatedly decimated at the polls in recent years depends on two representatives of the old guard is, by itself, the most eloquent picture of the deep crisis the FDP is in.
KUBICKI WINS BUT NOW MUST CONVINCE
The election turned out to be more contested than expected. Until a few minutes before the vote, Kubicki was the only candidate running; then, at the last moment, thirty-three delegates proposed the name of Strack-Zimmermann, reaching the quorum necessary to bring the competition to the congress ballot. The final result rewarded Kubicki with 59.72% of the votes, a percentage well below the 70% that many in the party had attributed to him on the eve. A victory, certainly, but far from a landslide.
Kubicki himself did not hide his awareness of the moment: “I am no longer the future of the FDP, but I can give a future to the FDP,” he declared, rhetorically claiming his role not as a symbol of renewal, but as a guarantor of a resurrection. On his agenda is also the thorny issue of the relationship with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD): Kubicki excludes a governing coalition with the far-right party but does not intend to rule out a priori the possibility of convergences on individual issues. For the party’s reconstruction, he allows a horizon of twelve months.
The German press gave great importance to the liberal congress. It is a historic party in the German political landscape, the core of many governing coalitions, but today in crisis of consensus and identity. It is out of the Bundestag and many regional parliaments, even those of Länder that once constituted its stronghold. But in a country that has always had a difficult relationship with liberalism, its presence is still considered essential, almost an antidote.
NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG: A DIVIDED PARTY AT THE WORST MOMENT
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Nzz) judged the congress “a missed opportunity,” if not even “a self-inflicted damage.” According to the Swiss daily, the FDP’s survival strategy would actually be straightforward: liberals are the only German political force that “consistently defends less state and more individual freedom,” and they should have leveraged this message. Instead, the congress showed a party “torn and disoriented.” Strack-Zimmermann’s move, who first withdrew her candidacy only to relaunch at the last minute, was judged by the Nzz as “destructive.”
The party’s situation is, moreover, critical: the FDP is present in only six regional parliaments out of 16, and in two of them, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, polls suggest it might fail to re-enter after the upcoming elections in September. The newspaper credits Kubicki with correctly framing the problem: defining the “firebreak wall” against AfD as “a strategic mistake” and arguing that objectively correct decisions should not be avoided just because that party might share them was, for the Zurich daily, a courageous and pragmatic move. Strack-Zimmermann, on the contrary, would have promised liberal principles with emphasis without explaining how to achieve them with an artificially narrowed range of political partners.
However, the Swiss paper’s verdict is harsh: the FDP cannot afford the luxury of a long internal dispute over orientation, and Kubicki now has to win back voters lost to AfD or CDU without having the full support of his own party. Just under 60% is certainly not the best passport to impose a strong line within a party divided at least into two factions.
HANDELSBLATT: VISIBILITY IS NOT ENOUGH, CONTENTS ARE NEEDED
More cautious in tone, but no less critical in substance, the Handelsblatt acknowledged Kubicki’s undisputed ability to attract media attention: in the weeks before the congress “he multiplied interviews and statements, generating by himself more clamor than his predecessor Christian Dürr managed to produce in several months.” For a party out of the Bundestag and at risk of irrelevance, this is already something.
But the economic daily warns against the illusion that visibility is enough: Kubicki, Dürr, and Strack-Zimmermann themselves are already among the best-known politicians in Germany, yet the party has lost support. The problem, according to the Handelsblatt, is that voters “have stopped understanding what the FDP really stands for.” The congress confirmed this confusion: voices rose from the microphones calling for a return to economic discipline, others invoking fewer internal struggles, others demanding a clear distancing from AfD, or raising issues such as anti-Semitism, Iranian policy, civil rights, and welfare state reform. For the economic daily, always among the papers most sensitive to the fate of the liberal party, “Kubicki must now build a political project based on content, not just on the ability to make news.” Unlike what the Neue Zürcher Zeitung claims, for the Handelsblatt distancing from AfD is a first step. The second, more difficult, is to oppose every right-wing populist drift with “authentically liberal responses,” capable of restoring to the FDP an identity recognizable to voters. The doubt that no German media or political scientist can answer is whether there is still electoral space in today’s Germany for this authentic liberalism.
