While the Greens celebrated their victory on the Rhine, only a handful of politicians and their wives were standing a few hundred meters away in the rooms of the FDP in the state parliament on Sunday evening and looked sadly into their white wine glasses.

Leonie Feuerbach

Editor in Politics.

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"This is a clear electoral defeat, a real smack," said Christof Rasche, the FDP parliamentary group leader in the state parliament.

His cell phone vibrated, he looked at it for a moment, then said he was constantly getting texts from people who said to him: "You really didn't deserve this.

The policy was actually good, at least not bad.” Economics Minister Andreas Pinkwart, for example, did a great job.

He looked helpless.

Forming a government is not their job

The FDP did not even do half as well as in 2017, when it got 12.6 percent more votes in NRW than ever before.

It is 5.9 percent, in the meantime the Liberals had to fear that they would fail at the five percent hurdle.

Top candidate Joachim Stamp also seems shaken, speaking of a bitter defeat on Sunday evening.

While SPD top candidate Kutschaty is still hoping for a traffic light, Stamp is firmly assuming black and green.

Moritz Körner, General Secretary of the FDP in North Rhine-Westphalia, says: "It's a very, very difficult defeat, it really hurts.

We will have to look closely at the reasons.

It is not our job to press ahead with forming a government today.”

The focus on the top candidates from the CDU and SPD harmed the FDP, says parliamentary group leader Rasche.

Those who wanted libertine voted for the CDU instead of the FDP.

In fact, 250,000 voters who voted for the FDP in 2017 cast their vote for the CDU on Sunday.

Only the Social Democrats lost slightly more votes, namely 260,000, to the Greens in this election.

Rasche says that national political issues hardly played a role in the election campaign, that national and international politics were constantly at stake, above all the Ukraine war.

The Green federal ministers Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock benefited from this in particular, as did the Green state associations.

The FDP failed at the five percent hurdle in Saarland and then did poorly in Schleswig-Holstein and now in North Rhine-Westphalia.

"That's not just due to local problems." But he does name a local problem: Minister of Education Yvonne Gebauer.

During the pandemic, parents and school administrators were bothered by their politics, especially the poor communication around corona tests and masks.

"A lot of things didn't go as well as they should," says Rasche.

But even that is not enough to explain the party's sagging.

Too tied to the Union?

Party colleagues can think of more explanations.

The slogan with which the NRW-FDP went into the election campaign - "Continue from here" - sounds too much like the status quo, which is in fact a crisis, says a board member.

In addition, the FDP in North Rhine-Westphalia has tied itself too closely to its coalition partner, the CDU.

Joachim Stamp complained about a lack of "black love" on the part of the CDU, but one should not be dependent on the affection of a competing party.