A Party at the End of Its Form

I. The occasion

On 30 May 2026, Wolfgang Kubicki, seventy-four years old and a member of the FDP since 1971, was elected the new party leader in a contested vote at the federal party conference in Berlin. He received 390 of 658 delegate votes, or 59.3 per cent. His opponent, the sixty-eight-year-old Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Member of the European Parliament and chair of the EU defence committee, had submitted her candidacy only at the conference itself, with the written support of thirty-three delegates, which met the quorum. She received 259 votes — 39.3 per cent.

Florian Gathmann commented on the event in Der Spiegel on 1 June 2026. His finding: the FDP is in the worst crisis of its history. The question, he says, is whether it will manage a comeback or whether this was the end. His proposed solution: Kubicki and Strack-Zimmermann must pull themselves together. If the two camps do not reconcile, the party might as well shut up shop. Democratic parties, Gathmann writes, are distinguished by bringing different currents together. Pure party is a huge mistake.

That is the mainstream diagnosis of these days. It is friendly, it is experienced, it is not wrong in its empirical components. But it operates on a level that does not reach the essential point. It treats the crisis as a problem of personal mediation within a constellation that is fundamentally intact. It assumes that both camps represent legitimate lines of the party and merely need to be reconciled. It overlooks the fact that this diagnosis makes the actual problem invisible.

II. The invisible diagnosis

What appears as a conflict between two camps is in truth a dispute within a single line about stylistic accents. Kubicki and Strack-Zimmermann are not two different liberalisms facing each other. They are two variants of the same line.

Kubicki is neoliberal with a right-wing rhetorical accent — tax cuts, cutting red tape, provocation as a stylistic device, occasional sympathies for authoritarian figures of style, criticism of the energy transition, of migration, of EU bureaucracy. Strack-Zimmermann is neoliberal with a security-policy accent — Atlanticist, loyal to NATO, resolute in her support for Ukraine, a defence liberal in the international sense. The two camps are not arguing about which liberalism, but about which profile. Both represent the same basic economic-policy line that has shaped the FDP since the 1980s: trust in the market as an end in itself, deregulation as a virtue, state restraint as a mark of identity.

This line has a name that is avoided in the party's self-image but is precisely defined in political theory: neoliberalism. In public debate today the term is often dismissed as a left-wing battle cry — a strategy that the party and its allies in the press pursue consistently. But avoiding the term changes nothing about the thing it denotes. An economic-policy line that understands state restraint not as an instrument for a higher goal (the functioning of the market economy, protection against monopolisation, social participation) but as a value in itself is neither ordoliberal nor social-liberal. It is neoliberal — in the precise definition of economic history since the 1970s.

It is on this line that the FDP has failed. Not on too social-liberal a turn. Not on a lack of capacity for compromise. But on clinging to a basic economic-policy assumption that has lost its viability in the social reality of the 2020s. The concentration of wealth in the older age groups, the erosion of social mobility, the growing importance of the climate question, the geopolitical shifts, the crisis of the social insurance systems — the neoliberal answer has no point of connection to any of these phenomena. It can perceive them only as disturbances, not as tasks.

Anyone in the FDP of recent years who tried to bring in other lines — to name the distribution of wealth as a political problem, to address generational fairness as a structural question, to defend the functioning of markets as an ordoliberal concern against the formation of monopolies — was rebuffed by the party leadership as a spokesman for left-wing battle cries. This rebuff was not an accidental rhetorical slip. It was the structural property of a party that had defined its own economic-policy identity so narrowly that anyone who represented the broader liberal tradition was shut out as alien.

III. The forgotten tradition

Through this exclusion, the FDP has become a party that has forgotten its own history. The tradition from which it has cut itself off is not a splinter group of its past. It is its main current.

Theodor Heuss, the first Federal President of the Federal Republic and one of the founding fathers of the FDP, was a social liberal in the tradition of Friedrich Naumann. Walter Scheel, who led the party into the social-liberal coalition with Brandt, stood for the Freiburg Theses of 1971, in which the FDP explicitly linked economic freedom with social responsibility. For two decades, Hans-Dietrich Genscher pursued a social-liberal line in foreign policy, with an ordoliberal understanding of the economy as its background.

Behind these individuals stands a larger intellectual tradition. In the 1930s and 1940s, the ordoliberal school of Freiburg economics — Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Müller-Armack — developed a concept that understood the market economy as an achievement of order, not as a state of nature. The state had the task of setting the framework within which competition functions without degenerating into monopoly. Prosperity for All was the programmatic formula with which Ludwig Erhard synthesised this line into the Social Market Economy in 1957.

Behind Erhard stands an intellectual line that reaches back even further and is hardly mentioned in current political debate. Franz Oppenheimer, Erhard's academic teacher in Frankfurt, developed in his main work Der Staat of 1908 the distinction between two ways of acquiring wealth: the economic means (labour and exchange) and the political means (appropriation through power). For Oppenheimer, the state was historically the organised political means. The task of a truly liberal politics was to protect the economic means against the political — not to abolish the state, but to bind it to its protective task, against appropriation by the stronger.

This line — Oppenheimer, Erhard, Heuss, Scheel, Genscher — is substantively social-liberal and ordoliberal, not neoliberal. It understands economic freedom as enabling prosperity and participation, not as an end in itself. It sees the state as the guarantor of order that protects the conditions under which freedom becomes possible for all. It takes the social question, the generational question, the distribution question seriously as liberal concerns, because without solutions to them freedom itself is undermined.

Since the 1980s, this line has systematically lost ground in the FDP. It was replaced by a line that defined economic freedom as the renunciation of state intervention and excluded all further questions — distribution, generational fairness, the ordering function of the state — as secondary or as left-wing concerns. Today's FDP is the end form of this development. It has left its own main current and can no longer admit it, because the admission would be the end of its present identity.

IV. The reserve

While the current leadership persists in its narrow line, another process has taken place that appears in mainstream reporting only as a note on personnel, but is structurally load-bearing. The two most substantial minds of the younger FDP generation have given up operational responsibility without making a formal break.

Johannes Vogel, forty-three years old, deputy federal chairman of the FDP from 2021 to 2025 and First Parliamentary Secretary of the Bundestag group, announced his withdrawal from professional politics immediately after the election defeat in February 2025. Since 1 December 2025 he has headed Human Resources and Legal at the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings in Cologne. Konstantin Kuhle, thirty-seven years old, member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2025 and chairman of the FDP in Lower Saxony from 2023 to March 2026, announced in October 2025 that he would not stand again at the state party conference in Celle and would not be available for the 2027 state election. He is a lawyer at the commercial law firm Blomstein in Berlin.

That is one layer of the process — the hard cut with the operational career. But there is a second one that goes unmentioned in the reporting. Both remain on the federal executive board of the FDP. Both work on the commission for the party's basic programme — the body responsible for the party's programmatic renewal. Both were present at the federal party conference on 30 May 2026; Kuhle, as state chairman of Lower Saxony, gave an interview to Phoenix on the direction of the FDP.

This dual position is remarkable. It is the position of the reserve — operational tasks given up, programmatic involvement kept. Whoever looks only at the operational career takes it for a withdrawal from politics. Whoever also perceives the programmatic layer sees a different movement: substance that has withdrawn from day-to-day business in order to work on the preconditions for a later re-engagement — if those preconditions arise.

The reserve is not where it is by chance. Vogel and Kuhle are the only representatives of the younger generation who have stood for a substantial programmatic line in the FDP that was not a mere continuation of Lindner. Vogel with labour-market, pension and generational policy, Kuhle with civil rights, rule-of-law questions and data protection. Both have championed topics that no longer have a substantial place in today's FDP line. Both noticed this and acted. Neither has given up — they have relocated.

That both chose exactly the same constellation — operational tasks given up, programmatic involvement kept — is statistically not a coincidence. It is the strategic answer of a substantive reserve group to a situation in which substance no longer finds room in active play. What appears as an individual career decision is structurally the preparation for a moment that is still to come.

V. Expecting the bang

What is likely after the party conference of 30 May 2026 can be read from the structural situation. The party has two leaders side by side in the tightest of spaces — the elected Kubicki and the defeated Strack-Zimmermann. Both struck irreconcilable tones in their first public statements. Both represent camps that cannot be reconciled on the question of substance, because they are not arguing about substance but about the last posts still to be handed out in a 4.3 per cent party.

In the next twelve to eighteen months there are state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate, Berlin and Saxony-Anhalt. For months, the FDP's poll ratings have been between three and four per cent. A further series of defeats is very likely. With each defeat the pressure on the new leader will rise, with each defeat the internal party conflicts will intensify, with each defeat further officials will leave operational business or go into the reserve.

The structural property of this constellation is that it cannot dissolve under its own power. A party whose two main camps are incapable of consensus cannot be reconciled by any personnel decision at the top. A party that has lost its programmatic substance cannot be revived by any reform of its statutes. A party whose voter base has been eroding for two decades cannot be won back by any communicative effort. There can be only one event that breaks the constellation open: the complete collapse of the present leadership formation.

This collapse is not improbable; it is to be expected. The question is not whether it will come, but when it will come and in what form. It could be an open split, in which Strack-Zimmermann leaves the party with her camp. It could be another contested vote against Kubicki, in which a new candidate stands. It could be a creeping self-dissolution, in which the party falls below the three per cent mark after further defeats and its structures erode. In each of these scenarios the result would be the same: the present leadership formation would no longer exist, and the old structure of officials would be shaken enough for room to open up for a substantial new beginning.

This new beginning would not have to be a new foundation. It could take place on the old structure, under the old brand name, but with a new programmatic line and new personnel. The preparation for this is already under way — in the commission for the basic programme, in which Vogel and Kuhle continue to work. What could happen after the bang is the activation of this reserve. A renewed FDP that takes up the social-liberal and ordoliberal tradition again — Heuss, Scheel, Erhard, Oppenheimer — carried by a generation that no longer had a place in the Lindner line and relocated in good time.

Whether this actually happens is open. Vogel and Kuhle could return when the bang comes and the party calls them. They could also stay in their positions in business if they judge the prospect of substantial renewal to be unlikely. The structural possibility exists; the personal decisions cannot be predicted.

VI. The tension with the Iron Law finding

Such a renewal would not solve the fundamental problem that the series diagnosed in The Anachronistic Structures and Rules of the Parties and in The Founding of a New Party and the Iron Law of Robert Michels. Even a renewed FDP with a substantial programme and new personnel would, over time, suffer the iron regularities of party-form organisation. It would build up a layer of officials who put their own interests before those of the members. It would create career paths in which the capacity for compromise becomes the selection criterion and substance is lost. After two or three legislative terms it would find itself in the situation in which the old FDP stands today.

This diagnosis remains valid. It is not cancelled by a renewal of the FDP.

What may, however, become apparent is a pragmatically wiser strategy than a wholesale switch to a new form of party. A renewed FDP could not abolish the iron regularities, but it could introduce experimental elements of new forms without betting the whole structure on them. Some of the mandates could be allocated according to the traditional rules, some according to new ones — for instance with the concept of a mandate without a place, in which a member of parliament is bound not to a constituency but to a thematic field in which he or she has substantial expertise. Or with the concept of non-party representatives of the people, in which some of the list places would be reserved for persons who do not belong to the party but are elected by its members because parliament needs their professional or civic substance.

Such concepts cannot be introduced as theory. They must be tested, on a limited scale, with the possibility of correction. If some of the members of parliament of a renewed FDP were elected according to these rules, it would be possible to observe after one legislative term what works and what does not. The experience from this experiment could become the starting point for further-reaching reforms — not through theory, but through testing.

That is the logic of the engineer, not that of the political movement. Not the form must be completely renewed, but the form can be rebuilt in one section while the existing operation keeps running. If the rebuild works, it is extended. If not, it has not endangered the existing operation.

VII. The sober forecast

The FDP as it exists today cannot be saved. This is not a polemical assertion but a structural observation. A party that has left its tradition of substance, that is torn between two camps of the same basic line, whose leaders in both camps are over seventy, whose younger forces of substance have moved into the reserve, whose voter base has been eroding for two decades, whose poll ratings lie between three and four per cent — such a party will, in the next one to two years, experience a turning point that ends its present form.

What happens after this turning point is open. Three scenarios are conceivable.

First scenario. The party disappears. It falls below the three per cent mark in a federal election, its finances collapse, its structures dissolve, its officials disperse to other parties or into business. In this scenario, political liberalism disappears from Germany as an organised force. Liberal positions continue to be represented — by individual members of parliament in the CDU, SPD and Greens — but there is no longer a party that understands liberalism as its main mission.

Second scenario. A new foundation takes place, on the ashes of the old party. A group of liberals of substance — perhaps led by people who are in the reserve today — founds a new party with an ordoliberal and social-liberal programme. This scenario has the advantage of clarity of content, but the hurdles are enormous: building an infrastructure, a voter base, a staff, a public profile. The experience of the most recent new foundations — from the DKP to the ödp, from the Pirates to the BSW — shows that these hurdles can be overcome only in special historical constellations.

Third scenario. The old party renews itself after the bang, from within, carried by the reserve. The brand name FDP is retained because it offers legal and organisational advantages — existing structures, existing funding, existing ballot access. But the programme and the personnel are different. This is pragmatically the most likely scenario, because it requires the least effort of construction and uses the existing resources. It is also the scenario supported by historical precedent — the CDU of the early 1950s, the SPD after Bad Godesberg, the Labour Party under Blair: in all three cases the brand name was retained while the party was substantially renewed.

Which of these scenarios occurs depends on decisions that cannot be predicted today. The structural situation forces a turning point; it does not determine what happens after the turning point. That will be decided by people who are in the reserve today or who have not yet become visible.

What must be noted at this point: the mainstream diagnosis that the FDP needs only the reconciliation of its two camps misses the core of the situation. What the FDP needs is not reconciliation but renewal. What would make renewal possible is not a personnel decision but a turning point. And what could emerge after the turning point is not a healed old party, but a new constellation that carries on the old name but is substantially something else.