Petrolhead minister’s drive to woo Germans with pro-car policies

Germany’s finance minister is one of the country’s best known petrolheads. Christian Lindner drives a Porsche 911, loves flicking through car ads and has claimed the first word he spoke as a toddler was “Auto”.Now the party that he leads, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), is trying to avert electoral oblivion by revving up its resistance to the Kulturkampf (culture war) that it claims is being waged against the automobile.
With an eye to key state elections next month and the federal election in just over a year, the FDP wants fewer cycle lanes and pedestrian zones, as well as free parking in cities — or at least a subsidised flat rate parking pass.
The call, in a party policy paper published last week, goes against the flow of the various traffic calming measures introduced in London, Paris and other big cities in Europe over the past few years.
It is also at odds with the policies of the other members of Germany’s ruling Ampel (traffic light) coalition, made up of the Greens and the Liberals (yellow) who serve under Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat (red) chancellor.
The FDP’s policy paper bears the personal imprint of Lindner, 45, who has often spoken in interviews of his love of cars and of Porsches in particular. He bought his first, a used entry-level Boxster 2.5, at 19. His current ride — several models later — is a 1982 911 SC with an air-cooled three-litre engine in its tail and a top speed of 140mph.
When he married his second wife, Franca Lehfeldt, on the swanky North Sea island of Sylt in July 2022, she arrived in an open-top Porsche Targa driven by her father. Lindner once said that his favourite topic outside politics was “anything that can be fuelled with petrol”.
During negotiations leading up to the formation of Scholz’s coalition in autumn 2021, the FDP leader vetoed the Greens’ proposal for a nationwide speed limit on the Autobahn network. At present there are large stretches on which people can drive as fast as they like.
The party’s stance has also helped to shape Germany’s policy at EU level, where alongside Italy it has been pushing back on the 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel-engined vehicles and urging that more attention be paid to “synthetic” petrol, despite widespread scepticism about whether it can be made commercially viable.
The FDP’s attempt to brand itself as the motorist’s friend has been mocked by the German media as a “return to the 1950s” and denounced as contrary to contemporary thinking on “mobility”.
“It’s extraordinary,” said Andreas Knie, a professor of sociology at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre and an expert on transport issues. “It’s difficult to know whether it’s a joke or a way of testing the nation’s sense of humour.”
German national governments have done everything they can to encourage motoring since the immediate postwar years, Knie claims, when the leaders of what was then West Germany worried that the country was being left behind by the rest of Europe.
This enthusiasm — reflected in popular culture in Kraftwerk’s song Autobahn — was reinforced by the crucial role carmakers played during the years of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). Its big names — Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz and BMW — continue to exert considerable influence, despite struggling against fierce Chinese competition in the transition towards electric vehicles.
“The German narrative is that we have the best car industry in the world, that builds the best engines, and they are so strong that the entire economy and our whole prosperity is based on the car industry alone,” said Knie.
Yet the direction of travel has long since begun to shift: starting in the 1970s, streets in the centres of many German cities were transformed into pedestrianised areas — among them Munich, where the area around the Marienplatz, the heart of the Bavarian capital, has been closed to cars since the 1972 Olympics.
The pandemic then prompted many local authorities, as elsewhere in Europe, to look at ways of encouraging cycling and to re-examine the way that cities are laid out.
Some newer restrictions, which have included cutting parking spaces and reducing the speed limit in towns to as little as 20kmh (12mph), have met resistance.
In Hanover, ambitious plans by Belit Onay, the Green mayor, to make the city car-free by 2030 prompted the SPD to walk out of the city’s ruling coalition last November. Local shopkeepers also claim it will be bad for trade.
In Berlin meanwhile, a 500-metre stretch of Friedrichstrasse, a major north-south thoroughfare, was pedestrianised at the end of January last year. But the move was controversial and the street reopened to cars six months later after elections in which the city government swung to the right.
It is on such opposition that the FDP is hoping to capitalise, even though its main target appears to be those who live in the countryside or smaller towns and are dependent on their cars. In cities their proposed reduction in parking fees, modelled on a recently introduced train ticket that gives a year of travel for €49, could hurt local authorities who rely on the revenue generated.
The first test of whether the FDP strategy will work could come in state elections due to be held in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia on September 1 and in Brandenburg three weeks later.
In all three, Lindner’s party will struggle to reach the minimum 5 per cent of the vote needed to secure representation in the state legislature. This could prove a foretaste of an even more serious humiliation in the federal election, due in September next year, with polls currently putting the party at 4.8 per cent.
The FDP’s coalition partners are also under pressure, although on Friday all three parties signalled their determination to try their full four-year term by sealing a deal on next year’s budget. The beneficiaries of their woes are the conservative Christian Democrats, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a newly formed populist left-wing party that is nationalist, anti-immigrant and sympathetic to Russia.
The FDP’s foray into Germany’s car wars, meanwhile, is yet to seize the popular imagination, judging by an election rally in Brandenburg last week that featured Lindner and Zyon Braun, the party’s leader in the state.
Given the chance to ask questions of Lindner — who arrived in the back of his official black Audi rather than at the wheel of his 911 — the audience showed no interest in cycle lanes and wanted instead to know what he would do to curb immigration and about taxes, pensions and halting the war in Ukraine.
Braun, 30, who had taken part in the policy’s launch three days earlier in Berlin, said he nevertheless thought the proposals, which also include allowing accompanied 16-year-olds to drive, could find their way into the party’s programme next year.
“We are saying that the car is part of the reality of people’s lives, especially in rural regions,” he said, recalling that he experienced his “first feeling of freedom” when he got his driving licence at 18, the minimum age in Germany.
Nodding as Braun spoke was Marcel Lietsch, 46, an army officer who lives locally and every day drives the 27 miles to Gatow, southwest of Berlin. It’s a 50-minute journey by car but would take more than double that and require two changes by train.
“Policy tends to be made by people who live in Berlin and who have the U-Bahn (underground) or S-Bahn (suburban train) round every corner and a bus every ten minutes, even at night,” he said.
“They think everyone should get on public transport, but if we had a bus here going round the local villages there would be only one person on it apart from the driver. If I lived in Berlin I would go by bike. Here it makes more sense to go by car.”