The Free Democratic Party (FDP), the closest-to-my-views political party in Germany, has been wiped out and will not even be able to enter the legislature. They were part of the previous ruling coalition. And, perhaps in an example of cosmic injustice, their vote share dropped more than that of the Greens, despite the Greens being far more responsible for Germany’s political and economic woes, and the Greens being a party filled with the kind of people who are emblematic of everything awful about the contemporary ‘Social Justice’ left (see here). Indeed, the Greens suffered the smallest drop out of the ‘Traffic Light’ coalition. The FDP, on the other hand, has suffered a wipeout. I can only presume the FDP went into that coalition with the hope of amplifying the SPD and Greens’ (perceived) dedication to civil liberties and attenuating the economic damage that they’d cause. Clearly, the FDP failed to do these things. Here are two lessons that the FDP really needs to learn from this situation:

1. The center-left are no longer dedicated to a classically liberal position on civil liberties. If what happened during Covid (both rampant censorship and crippling lockdowns) didn’t make this clear, nothing will. Liberal individualism has been completely purged from the left. The old Social Liberal tradition (advocacy of a mixed economy and strong protections for civil liberties on individualist, Isiah-Berlin-esque grounds) is simply no longer welcome on the left.
2. The left cannot be taught economic reality, or even if they could, they’re indifferent to it. After all, their primary client groups these days are no longer workers in productive industries, but fundamentally unproductive bureaucrats and professionals in fields that are not productive and typically dependent on the government in some way. To the left, the private sector’s purpose is to subside its client groups, economic reality be damned. You cannot teach economics to people who essentially see material production as beneath or irrelevant to them.

Hopefully, this teaches the FDP that if you lie down with dogs, you will get fleas. In the current Western political climate, where there is no liberalism left on the left, classical liberal (or libertarian) parties have nothing to gain by forming coalitions with them. This was not the case back during the previous Culture War against the Religious Right (the one that occurred back during the George W. Bush era). Back in that time, the establishment left was not aligned with the military-industrial complex or national security state and still embraced liberalism on social and cultural matters. During this era, it made sense for classical liberals to make a coalition with the left, especially given how the socially conservative right abandoned even the pretence of fiscal sanity during this era. But that era ended 16 years ago with Obama’s landslide victory, and since then the changes in Western political culture have been immense. The big ones are the realignment of the national security state/military-industrial complex behind the left, and the mainstreaming of Intersectional Social Justice ideology (a.k.a. the ‘woke mind virus’). In this new age, the political calculus is radically different. I think Friedrich Merz will be mediocre-to-acceptable as Germany’s Chancellor. Presumably, he will form a ‘Grand Coalition’ with the SPD. However, Merz’s level of success will be critically dependent on how much he has to concede to his coalition partners, and unfortunately, the SPD will likely attempt to neuter him, and they will likely attempt to punish him (by leaving the coalition) if he tries to work around the SPD by relying on AfD votes to pass legislation (and the AfD is notably more economically liberal than the SPD, alongside holding to a classical liberal position on certain civil liberties such as freedom of speech). But it is the FDP – the most consistently liberal party in Germany – that I am concerned for here. And hopefully, this election result makes it clear as day – they will not benefit from allying with the SPD, Greens, or for that matter Die Linke (The Left party). Lie down with dogs (or, to borrow Javier Milei’s terms, leftist communist turds), and you get fleas.