It has been a rocky few months for Christian Lindner, and for the German political system that he has thrown into chaos.
In November, Mr. Lindner, who was the federal finance minister, effectively toppled Germany’s fragile government in a bid for his political life. He goaded Chancellor Olaf Scholz into expelling him from the ruling coalition.
That set off a snap election. It means that Mr. Lindner is the primary reason the country will select a new parliament on Sunday, at a time of European and global upheaval in the early weeks of the new Trump administration, and not next fall as originally scheduled.
Mr. Lindner’s move was a bid to save his party, which had slumped in the polls, from its association with an unpopular government. He was trying to avoid a temporary death sentence in federal politics. The question is whether it will work.
In the final week of the campaign, Mr. Lindner and his pro-business Free Democrats remain just under 5 percent of nationwide support in most polls. That is a crucial threshold in German politics. Score above 5 percent, and your party gets into parliament. Fall below it, and you are almost certainly out.
And yet — because of how Germany’s political system is structured — Mr. Lindner retains a chance to play a kingmaker role in the formation of the next government. He just needs to scrape together a little more support, somehow.
“He doesn’t have good cards,” said Stefan Merz, a director at Infratest dimap, a polling firm in Berlin. “But it can’t be ruled out.”
Mr. Lindner is an outlier in German politics, where unflashy, stoic characters abound. He is fond of hunting and sports cars, with an aversion to autobahn speed limits.
Mr. Lindner’s campaign declined interview requests from The New York Times. In an interview last fall with the podcast Hotel Matze, shortly before he initiated the end of the governing coalition, he mused about his fans and detractors alike.
“Those who like you say, ‘The last hope of bourgeois politics in Germany, the last free-market economist in politics,’” Mr. Lindner said. Critics, he added, call him a government debt fetishist, a “neoliberal exploiter and misanthropist.”
“I deal with it in a relaxed manner,” he added.
Mr. Lindner’s grandparents were bakers. His parents divorced when he was a young boy. His mother taught him to prioritize financial independence. From a young age, he yearned to move fast.
A video on YouTube captures a television show for young people recorded in 1997 in which an 18-year-old Mr. Lindner, wearing a suit with a monstrous cow-patterned tie, talks about the advertising business he had started with a friend. It earned him enough to buy his first Porsche by the age of 20.
He was also a political prodigy. Mr. Lindner joined the Free Democrats, or F.D.P., a neoliberal party that favors low taxes on business and high earners — and no speed limits on the highway — at age 16. At age 34, he became the youngest chairman in party history, and he brought it back from the political wilderness.
After failing to win 5 percent of the vote in Germany’s 2013 elections, the Free Democrats spent four years out of parliament. Mr. Lindner brought the party back in 2017, though he pulled out of negotiations to join a ruling coalition with Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the liberal Green Party. “It is better not to govern than to govern wrongly,” Mr. Lindner said at the time.
In 2021, Mr. Lindner helped the Free Democrats score 11 percent of the vote, in part by leading a charge against government restrictions on daily life and economic activity. He joined Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens in a so-called “traffic light” coalition. It was always a troubled partnership, but it worsened as Germany’s economy stagnated and the government’s approval ratings sank.
A fissure opened: Mr. Scholz and the Greens wanted to relax a limit on government borrowing — known as the debt brake — in order to juice economic growth. Mr. Lindner refused.
He also saw ominous signs in the polling. All the ruling parties had lost support, but of the three, only the Free Democrats had slipped below 5 percent. His core of support remains “wealthy entrepreneurs in West Germany,” said Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.
Mr. Lindner hatched a plan to collapse the government, in hopes of saving his party. Publicly, it began with a leaked document in which he demanded swift changes from the Green Party’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, and Mr. Scholz.
His requests included tax cuts, regulatory relief and the relaxation of some climate goals that he said were pushing energy prices higher. He was daring Mr. Scholz to fire him. On the day after President Trump won another term in the United States, Mr. Scholz obliged, forcing early elections in the process.
Days later, Die Zeit newspaper revealed that Free Democratic leaders had spent weeks preparing to break with the coalition partners, including drafting a script for it. Mr. Lindner never denied the report. He explained that his party simply was seeking an economic turnaround in order “to make Germany successful again.”
In a blistering statement defending his firing, Mr. Scholz said Mr. Lindner cared only for his base electorate and for “the short-term survival of his own party.”
The ensuing political fallout has been shadowed by the opening weeks of Mr. Trump’s administration, including threats of tariffs on European exports and a pullback of America’s military security blanket that has protected Germany since the end of World War II.
Mr. Lindner has tried frantically to pull the Free Democrats above the 5 percent line. In an early bid to grab attention, he posted on the social media platform X that Germany needed more disruptive thinking like the billionaire Elon Musk has. Mr. Musk instead endorsed a different party — the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD — parts of which have been deemed extremist by German intelligence agencies.
Undaunted, Mr. Lindner continues to preach tax cuts and deregulation, to defend Germany’s constitutional curb on government debt, and to slam his former government partners for their management of the economy.
Mainstream parties have said they will not invite the AfD into a government. So Mr. Lindner’s party may still make a possible coalition partner for the poll-leading Christian Democrats and their chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz. It could be a valuable one if the returns on Sunday are especially fractured.
But for now, Mr. Merz, who was a guest at Mr. Lindner’s wedding, is not tipping his hand.
As Mr. Lindner hovered a point below 5 percent this month, Mr. Merz was asked in an interview with German media about Mr. Lindner’s Free Democrats. “Four percent,” he said, “is four percent too much.”
