German users - why did the FDP collapse in 2013?

[Illuminati Blood Drinker]

Exactly as it says. The FDP did pretty well for a not-so-major party - seven seats short of a full 100 and almost 15% of the vote is pretty dang good, if I say so myself (though in ignorant America we don't believe in non-major parties, we just vote Satan if he has a D/R next to his name, so what do I know ). Then 2013 rolled around and they f[inks]ing imploded, getting themselves kicked out of parliament and failing to win even 5% of the vote. My question is - why? I can't imagine it had much to do with the AfD, given they more-or-less fizzled out, only doing 0.1% better than the FDP (and AFAIK the FDP isn't even particularly Eurosceptic, so it's not like AfD pulled votes from them). Did they pull a LibDem-esque huge blunder that irreversibly damaged their image in the eyes of the public, or what?

[BundouYMB]

The FDP stood for nothing. They got ran over by the CDU in negotiations. After a while (read=almost immediately) they gave up trying to negotiate at all. They were, without exaggeration, far more useless than the LibDems. Their entire campaign for the last couple years was literally reduced to begging CDU voters to lend votes.

[Hydera]

I thought he only asked german users....


Well the FDP was caught in donation scandals. Particually one in which a hotel chain donated to them which they later put included them in a round of tax cuts to businesses.

http://www.dw.de/two-governing-parties-hit-by-donations-scandal/a-5140071

CDU blamed FDP. And FDP which got a lot of 'loan votes' (voting strategically). Those voters went backtowards the CDU.



Meanwhile a crucial amount of voters that would of kept them in the Bundestag went towards the euroskeptic AfD. Both parties shared an economic liberal(in the global sense of the term not the american usage). While AfD was also against the bailouts for Greece that FDP voted for grudgingly due to the larger CDU making them do so. So that attracted FDP voters who were against the greek bailout.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

As per usual, Hashemite's excellent blog about international elections is the best place to go for answers to this type of questions:

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[Beezer]

I'd say everything's been said already. Ultimately the party doesn't have much of a core electorate (unlike the Greens of Left Party) so they depend on syphoning off votes from the CDU in particular to cross the 5%-threshold. Quite a few center-right voters who felt the CDU had become too Social Democratic jumped on the Liberal bandwagon in 09. When the FDP turned out to not deliver on any of its promises, their voters just asked "what's the point?" and rejoined the CDU, stayed home or defected into the AfD camp.

[palandio]

... Ultimately the party doesn't have much of a core electorate...

This.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The final straw was when the FDP noticed they had fallen below 5% in the polls shortly prior to election day and started to desperately beg for lend votes from CDU voters. Angela Merkel's public and blunt response was that anyone who wants see a CDU government led by her should vote for the CDU and not the FDP.

The point is, the CDU probably could have saved the FDP if they had wanted to. But Merkel decided to say: F**k 'em.

[Brittain33]

I'm curious what a FDP-Links voter looks like.

[Zinneke]

I'm curious what a FDP-Links voter looks like.

Somebody who became disillusioned with capitalism circa 2008, a bankrupt trader in Frankfurt or perhaps more likely the same kind of anti-establishment leftist the LibDems attracted in Britain who went through a political phase of ''true'' theoretical liberalism and then revert back to regulationist gradualism and a temporary whiff of Post-Keynesianism.

How (un)popular were the FDP in the East?

[Beagle]

The final straw was when the FDP noticed they had fallen below 5% in the polls shortly prior to election day and started to desperately beg for lend votes from CDU voters. Angela Merkel's public and blunt response was that anyone who wants see a CDU government led by her should vote for the CDU and not the FDP.

The point is, the CDU probably could have saved the FDP if they had wanted to. But Merkel decided to say: F**k 'em.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Lower Saxony state election earlier that year was the main reason why no substantial CDU to FDP loan voting took place. Based on the polls, more than half of the FDP votes in Lower Saxony were loan votes. Had the CDU voters stayed with the Union, McAllister would have had a majority on his own, but with the FDP entering the Landtag, the SPD-Greens won by one seat. I think had this not happened, the FDP might have very well have got enough loan votes to get over the hurdle.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm curious what a FDP-Links voter looks like.

Some weirdo posting on an online politics discussion forum, probably.

[Beezer]

The FDP did quite well in the east for a while if I remember correctly (there were two "liberal" bloc parties in the GDR after all with plenty of members and a decent sized bank account). So I'm sure that the average eastern FDP voter isn't exactly a Westerwelle small government liberal but a former LDPD-NPDP member, hence these folks don't have much of a problem voting for the Left Party which is in some parts of the east first and foremost seen as an East German rather than a Socialist party. I doubt too many Wessi-FDPler on the other hand would join the Left Party.