(Bloomberg View) -- Most assume that voters will give German Chancellor Angela Merkel another mandate in the September elections. The big question is which party she will govern with this time.
The Free Democratic Party, which is both economically and socially liberal, is back after a four-year hiatus and hoping to claim its traditional kingmaker role. FDP leader Christian Lindner casts himself as a sort of German Emmanuel Macron. "In France, a good-looking, eloquent, reform-friendly 39-year-old has won," Lindner likes to say on the campaign trail. "I'm 38," he added for extra effect in a June 20 speech during German Industry Day in Berlin.
Lindner, with his designer stubble, sharp suits and edgy, sometimes snarky eloquence is the kind of rock-star politician France has just elected but Germany has traditionally treated with caution. But he has brought his venerable party, which was part of governing coalitions for 48 of the 68 years of post-World War II German political history, back from the dead.
The FDP has always been a "free people, free markets" type of party. But by 2013, the year Thomas Piketty published his "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" to global acclaim, many Germans were looking for a different message. The FDP was dismissed as the "party of lawyers and dentists." Its aging liberal base was in retreat. The party crashed out of the German parliament that year for the first time in its history; Lindner would later say he inherited a "stinking corpse."
In 2017, though, the party is riding a wave of unexpected success. It has done well in the two most recent regional elections, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein and in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia -- Lindner's home state, where the vote result was the FDP's best ever. In both states, it is the junior coalition partner of Merkel's Christian Democrats (in Schleswig-Holstein a third party, the Greens, are part of the deal).
According to the polls, the CDU and the FDP together don't have a majority on a federal level, but it becomes possible with the Greens' support. The Greens' leaders have recently signaled their openness to such an alliance under certain conditions, including the legalization of gay marriage.
The shape of the ruling coalition is extremely important in Germany. The parties draw up lengthy, binding agreements that outline the joint legislative agenda. The 2013 agreement between the CDU and its current junior partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), is 185 pages long. As a result of the deal, Merkel's current government has a distinctly socialist flavor; it has introduced (and since hiked) a national minimum wage, and it's been far friendlier to immigrants than the CDU's traditional policies might warrant.
CDU and SPD politicians, however, are tired of the alliance. Both parties' top brass have been looking for ways to find separate paths to a majority. That's been harder for the SPD, which has been slipping in the polls, but easier for the CDU thanks to Merkel's return to popularity in recent months -- and to Lindner's charisma and feisty campaigning.
Lindner is a 21st century celebrity: a car lover who owns a classic Porsche as old as himself but rides on official business in a Mercedes plug-in hybrid; a failed dot-com entrepreneur whose spirited defense of the right-to-fail made national headlines in 2015. The party leader is purposeful but relaxed, and he makes people laugh. He's accused of being a one-man show -- but even if that's so, German politics is structured so that a coalition in which he takes part will adopt some of his party's values.
The FDP has had a colorful design overhaul, and its program is a modernized version of its usual small-government, tax-cutting tenets. The party wants to establish a 50 percent total tax burden limit for individuals, including social contributions, and move people with middle class incomes out of the top income tax bracket. It advocates an "uncomplicated state" with government offices cutting staff and turning into one-stop shops -- a near-impossibility in a country that still lives the Prussian bureaucratic tradition. It pushes the digitalization of government, education and business. And it manages to be both tougher and softer on immigration than Merkel's government: It would send Syrian refugees home once the civil war in their homeland ends and establish a point system for immigrants to lure only the most qualified, but it proposes a shorter path to citizenship and even the use of English as a second language in government offices to make life easier for newcomers.
The second partner in a German ruling coalition often gets the influential post of foreign minister. FDP member Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a key architect of the German reunification and now a political legend, served in that capacity under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. If Lindner's FDP gets to influence Germany's foreign policy, it will advocate for a soft treatment of the U.K. as it exits the European Union and a harsh treatment of Greece, which he says should be out of the euro zone but not the EU.
It will likely also push for a continued close partnership with the U.S. Lindner has said that, angry as Germans might be at Donald Trump, the Atlantic alliance is fundamental for the country's place in the world." A European delegation should be in Washington every day," Lindner says.
With these views, the FDP is suddenly no longer irrelevant or marginalized. It's a smartly packaged alternative to the CDU for center-right voters; it's certainly a less distasteful one than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The latter has been slipping in the polls all year, losing voters not just to Merkel's party but also to the FDP.
Merkel would probably work well with Lindner, should he make it to the governing coalition. A compromise-seeker, she likes to steer a middle course, and an injection of pro-business liberalism seems in order after four years of watered-down socialism. As they watch Lindner rise, SPD leaders probably like their current arrangement with the CDU much better than just a few months ago -- but it may already be too late to save it.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.