Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, who collapsed Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition earlier this month in a dispute over the budget, reportedly plotted their exit weeks before the final split, referring to their plans internally as “D-day”.
Newspapers Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the FDP had intended from at least September to force a situation that would provoke the German chancellor into pulling the plug on his tripartite coalition.
The timing of the collapse, on the same day Donald Trump was declared as the victor of the US presidential elections, sent shock waves across Europe, especially when Germany was being looked to for stability, leadership and continuity.
It came earlier this month when Scholz sacked his finance minister Christian Lindner, the FDP leader, following his presentation of an 18-page ultimatum that would have upended many of the three-year-old administration’s policies.
All but one of the other FDP ministers in the government resigned subsequently, leading to the governmental collapse.
According to the newspapers’ research, the FDP first hatched the “D-day” plans at a meeting in a prominent Potsdam villa at the end of September, honing them at several subsequent meetings. Lindner’s list of demands was referred to as the “torpedo”.
Lindner has dismissed the accusations as “election campaign hullabaloo”.
The government collapse has sparked a political crisis in Europe’s largest economy, at a time when it is dealing with considerable economic difficulties and growing internal strife over how to tackle significant issues such as Russia’s war with Ukraine and the climate emergency. Early elections are due to take place on 23 February, more than seven months ahead of schedule, after a vote of confidence in Scholz in December, which he is expected to lose.
Rolf Mützenich, the parliamentary head of Scholz’s SPD, was among those to criticise Lindner. He said the party’s use of the term D-day, which refers to Europe’s liberation from the Nazis, “for its own political enactment … shows how far Mr Lindner has fallen. It shows how right and important it was for Olaf Scholz to have turfed out this disreputable man.”
Lindner and the FDP have rejected the claims. “It’s electioneering,” he said. “Where’s the news? Olaf Scholz has himself admitted that he had already been considering my dismissal back in the summer. And of course without any economic reform the FDP would have been forced to leave the coalition.”
