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FDP European Party Conference in Berlin in January 2024: Delegates vote

Photo: dts news agency / IMAGO

When a group of traffic light opponents from Kassel recently initiated a membership survey in the FDP, a coalition member was surprised at the small number of signatures required for this from the Liberals: 500. As a precaution, SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert asked his colleague from the FDP, Bijan Djir-Sarai, whether that could be true. The general secretary replied in the affirmative and said: “That’s how it is in the FDP participation party.”

The member survey was carried out, the results were published at the beginning of the new year, a narrow majority of around 52 percent were in favor of remaining in the traffic light coalition.

The FDP leadership around party leader Christian Lindner was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Although the member survey would not have been binding, a yes vote for leaving the coalition with the SPD and the Greens would have been of great symbolic importance.

But the conditions for the member survey could be changed at the upcoming FDP federal party conference in Berlin at the end of April.

This is what a proposal from delegates from several state associations, including many from Baden-Württemberg, which SPIEGEL has received, provides for this. It says: “In order to strengthen the instrument and at the same time set sufficiently high hurdles, the quorum for a member survey should be two and a half percent in the future. This also prevents misuse.«

Even if a member survey is not binding, “it sends an important signal.” In view of the increased mobilization potential through digitalization, the quorum must also be high enough "so that the party is only surveyed on topics of fundamental importance." The currently very low quorum invites "significantly more member surveys to be carried out on less important topics in the future, and thus weakening this important tool of intra-party debate."

When the member survey was introduced in 2015, the party had around 50,000 members; 500 members at that time corresponded to around one percent of the membership. The party has now grown to over 72,000 members; the "500 members set at that time now only correspond to around 0.69 percent of the membership." It is therefore necessary to “switch to a percentage quorum in the member survey in order to do justice to the FDP’s membership growth.”

Specifically, this means: If you base their 2.5 percent demand on the current number of members of 72,000, the quorum would be 1,800 members.

The district chairman of the Kassel FDP and initiator of the member survey about the traffic lights being turned off, Matthias Nölke, reacted critically to the amendment. He told SPIEGEL that "one wants to react to the exercise of democratic rights by restricting them." The former FDP member of the Bundestag was annoyed. "Large parts of the FDP establishment still do not understand that not only the members behind the few hundred signatures, but 48 percent of the liberal base are decidedly against the traffic light policy." So far, there has been no credible statement on "how the downward spiral can be stopped should," he referred to the FDP's recent losses in the repeat federal election.

In the affected 455 voting districts in the capital, the FDP had lost almost two-thirds of its votes and only got 3.3 percent.

In addition, she lost a Bundestag mandate without replacement, which means that the FDP parliamentary group has shrunk to 91 seats.