Friday saw the leak of a policy paper in which Lindner, who is also the leader of the FDP, laid out a plan for tax cuts and scaling back already adopted climate policies. His proposals, which are in line with his party’s balanced-budget approach, are starkly at odds with the visions of the SPD and the Greens, the FDP’s more left-leaning coalition partners.
The 18-page leaked document has drawn comparisons to a 1982 paper by then-Economy Minister Otto Graf Lambsdorff (also of the FDP), which ended up bringing down the SPD-led government. This paved the way for a takeover by the center-right Christian Democratic Union — and to Helmut Kohl leading Germany for 16 years.
Lindner’s detailed text, which reads as if weeks of work went into it, sent shock waves through Berlin and prompted Scholz to invite the head of the SPD and Lindner for talks in the chancellery on Sunday evening.
Subsequent crisis meetings between Scholz, Lindner and Habeck have since been scheduled, with the final one to take place Wednesday. That evening, the government’s highest-ranking council, the coalition committee, is set to convene to decide whether the partners sign off on a common plan — or go their separate ways.
The latter would either mean the collapse of the governing coalition and thus snap elections, likely in spring; or an FDP exit from the governing coalition, with the SPD and the Greens continuing to rule in a minority government.
“The chancellor and the finance minister have assured each other that there will be no spontaneous decision until Wednesday,” Bijan Djir-Sarai, the FDP’s general secretary, told reporters on Monday in Berlin.