AfD and Linke are too strong: Merz is already cornered, his first very heavy resignation

Christian Lindner is leaving politics. Robert Habeck no longer wants to hold office. There is no news of Olaf Scholz , but it is natural to expect signs of stability and not of flight from the incumbent chancellor. When the next government is formed, the Nordic Social Democratic leader, Scholz is originally from Hamburg, could step back or, at least, to the side. The beating suffered on Sunday by the three parties that formed the Ampel-Koalition, the traffic light coalition, is starting to have its effects. The first to cast off is Christian Linder, undisputed leader of the Liberal Party (FDP) for twelve years, a geological era ago. "I am now retiring from active politics," he wrote on X and added: "With only one feeling: gratitude for almost 25 intense and demanding years full of education and debate." Today Lindner is only 45 years old, but he started very young, taking over the party in 2013 after it had been crushed by the alliance with Angela Merkel. From 2009 to 2013, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats governed together: at the end of the legislature, the experienced chancellor from the East led the CDU to the peak of 41.5% - a dream for Friedrich Merz - claiming all the successes of her second government and unloading every failure on the Liberals, who fell to 4.8% and remained outside of Parliament.

THE UNRELIABLE To resolve the crisis, the FDP relied on the young and promising Lindner, and he actually brought the party back to the Bundestag four years later. Since then, however, his name has rhymed with unreliability: at the beginning of 2018, the liberal leader surprisingly torpedoed the Jamaica coalition (CDU-Greens-FDP) on the eve of its launch. A stab in the back to Merkel who had worked for three months to set it up. That "great refusal" by Lindner forced the chancellor to marry the Social Democrats for the second time. Last December, finally, Lindner sent the "traffic light" coalition flying, with the (electoral) result of leaving the party exactly where he found it: outside the Bundestag. Even the Greens' chancellor candidate, Robert Habeck, is taking a step back to lick his wounds. The Ecologists lost 3.1 points: today with 11.6 they are no longer the third but the fourth German party. Of the three in the government they are the ones who lost the least but Habeck has already decided: he will remain vice chancellor and minister of the economy until the next government is formed, then he will retire. "But will you accept your new role as a member of parliament?", they asked him. "We'll see later."

At the SPD, Lars Klingbeil is warming up the engines: the SPD president has already run for group leader in the Bundestag and his name was already circulating among those of the possible finance ministers in the next Merz government. The SPD has lost, some will say, so why assign it such an important ministry? Because if the Social Democrats brought home the worst result in their history, Merz's CDU did just a little better, with the second lowest result ever. With his relatively few seats in the Bundestag, Merz cannot do without the SPD nor can he take on the Greens in their place: in addition to the Nein! of the Bavarian Christian Socialists, the sum of the CDU-CSU votes with those of the ecologists does not add up to 316. In short, the government appears weak: led by a man who took 25 years to become head of the CDU and when he succeeded, he did so with poor results and supported by a party that is literally on the rocks.

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