If the current finance minister, Olaf Scholz, should actually be promoted to the chancellery in four weeks after the federal election, then he would owe it very much to the FDP chairman Christian Lindner.

Lindner's strategy of tying himself particularly closely to the CDU applicant Armin Laschet weakens his chances of winning the election.

In the polls, Lindner's party is currently traded at up to 13 percent.

He has withdrawn a considerable part of this sympathy from the Union parties - which in turn increases the chances of the Social Democrats in first place.

The formation of a coalition does not make it any easier afterwards. As uncomfortable as it would be for the Greens to join a previously firmly established black-and-yellow bloc, the maneuver would be complicated for Lindner to make the Social Democrat Scholz Chancellor with the votes that the Union had poached. Whether he can do that depends primarily on questions of economic and financial policy: Does this result in a coalition agreement that, for example, visibly bears the signature of the FDP on tax issues or climate protection?

In any case, advertising has long since started. Scholz is now sympathetically lamenting how nasty the negotiator at the time Angela Merkel and her green friends tried four years ago to force the FDP into an extra role in the Jamaica negotiations. The message is clear: this won't happen to me again. For a social democrat who has to work less intensively with the Greens than the CDU Chancellor once did, atmospherically this could even be easier.

In terms of content, at first glance there is a real world of gulf between the election programs.

The SPD wants to increase the top tax rate, the FDP also exempt higher incomes from the solidarity surcharge.

When it comes to climate protection, the Social Democrats think that the state has to regulate a lot, while Lindner's people are happy to leave most of it to the market.

The simulation games have long since begun behind the scenes to see how the two could possibly be combined.

It is not for nothing that the SPD, for example, likes to emphasize that climate protection is primarily about private investments.

The will wasn't there

In any case, economic and political imagination is required - regardless of whether Laschet or Scholz end up doing business with the Greens and FDP or whether the election result enables further constellations. The method of the past few years has come to an end of making ever more detailed compromises in ever more extensive coalition agreements, negotiating the mother's pension for the pension at 67 or - as in the failed Jamaica talks - by a few gigawatts on the coal phase-out wrestle. Even then, people wondered why the negotiators didn't first draw the main lines, for example to achieve more climate protection, but in a market-based way. The participants did not have the will to do so.

One chance could lie in the fact that the constellation is even more difficult this time, not only politically but also financially: The gaps in the public budgets that the Corona crisis management has left place narrow limits on the method of small-scale give and take. And the fact that at least one of the parties involved has to jump over its shadow requires a more demanding program than stringing together bullets.

The FDP, in particular, liked to label its turn to new coalition partners with such headings, whether it was the 1969 alliance with Willy Brandt (“Daring to more democracy”) or in 1982 the support for Helmut Kohl (“spiritual-moral turn”). In reality, the demands were not always fulfilled; Brandt's famous first government declaration even promised a reform of the Federal Railroad, which has not really been successful to this day. Well worth the try.