Plummeting Popularity Calls Grow for Foreign Minister to Step Down as Party Leader
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle
Foto: picture-alliance/ dpaSince Germany's center-right coalition government came to power late last year it has failed to impress many voters and its popularity has plummeted.
Yet the biggest casualty of voter dissatisfaction is not Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, but rather the smaller pro-business Free Democratic Union (FDP). Now calls are growing for the FDP's party leader, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, to step down.
The rebellious noises from within his own party have become louder as opinion polls show the party hovering dangerously close to the 5-percent mark -- the minimum hurdle for parties to be able to secure seats in the federal parliament. That is a loss of almost two-thirds of the support it attracted in the general election. It was Westerwelle who led the FDP to its best ever showing of 14.6 percent in last September's vote, yet now some senior figures in the party say that he should step aside to allow someone else to revive the party's fortunes.
One seemingly constant critic of his leadership has been Jörg-Uwe Hahn, the head of the party in the state of Hesse. "In the eyes of many members the party leader bears the main responsibility for this loss of image," he told the DAPD news agency. He said that Westerwelle should concentrate on his post of foreign minister.
Calls to Give Up the Double Role
Rüdiger Linsler, the general secretary of the FDP's state chapter in Saarland, has echoed these sentiments. Speaking to the Saarbrücker Zeitung in the western German city on Wednesday, he said: "I don't believe that Guido Westerwelle, in his double role as foreign minister and party leader, can restore the lost trust of the voters in the FDP." He added that he hoped Westerwelle would recognize this "before the damage to the FDP became greater."
Westerwelle is currently on a trip to the Balkans and has yet to comment on the latest criticism. However, earlier in the week he sought to reassure the party that its poor showing in the polls would not continue. "The mood in the party will become much better, when the good results of our policies become visible," he told the FDP executive committee on Monday, during its first meeting after the summer break.
And other senior figures in the party have come to the leader's defense. Wolfgang Kubicki, the head of the FDP in the state of Schleswig-Holstein in northwestern Germany, told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper that while he understood the "frustration" in the party, "the weekly attacks on Guido Westerwelle don't lead anywhere."
Attacks 'Dangerous'
And Bavaria's economics minister, Martin Zeil, lashed out at the Westerwelle critics, saying "a debate about personnel is the most stupid thing we could be doing right now." Speaking to SPIEGEL ONLINE he said that it "achieves nothing" and argued that the party should instead be concentrating on the issues. Meanwhile, the head of the party's youth wing, Lasse Becker, called the attacks "dangerous," because they ignored the real problems.
Much of the frustration within the FDP has come from being unable to push through its election pledges of tax cuts, plans that were scuppered after Germany's national deficit soared as a result of measures aimed at buffering the country from the global economic crisis. With Greece close to bankruptcy and other euro-zone countries teetering on the brink of economic disaster, the German government was forced to implement a sweeping austerity package to help restore confidence in the euro.
Westerwelle now faces into a series of regional party conferences in September, when he will be able to sound out just how restive the mood among the party faithful really is.
And the FDP faces crucial state elections early next year in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, a liberal stronghold. If the current CDU-FDP coalition in that state were to be defeated, then things could get very uncomfortable indeed for the foreign minister.
