FDP leader says party now willing to work with AfD

At its annual party conference in Berlin, the centre-right, liberalist FDP has elected a new leader and publicly changed its stance on forming coalitions with the far-right, populist AfD.

FDP elects new leadership

FDP members have elected 74-year-old Wolfgang Kubicki as their new party leader. The right-wing liberal won 59,3 percent of the vote, while his main opponent, the centrist liberal Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, took 39 percent.

The FDP has recently been playing a minor role in German parliamentary politics. In November 2024, then Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) sacked Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) for failing to cooperate with coalition partners. 

Almost all FDP government ministers followed Lindner out the door, and the coalition collapsed just under a year before the next scheduled federal election.

When the election arrived in February 2025, the centre-right party saw its worst result since its formation in 1948 (4,3 percent) and failed to reach the 5 percent margin required to enter parliament.

At conference on Saturday, Kubicki said getting his party back over the 5 percent margin is now the main goal, “everything else will be subordinate to it”.

Kubicki says FDP will dump firewall

A potential collaboration with the AfD is also on Kubicki's agenda. The leader said opting out of the agreement between Germany’s democratic parties not to work with the far-right party, known as the firewall (Brandmauer), was “obvious”.

Newly designated FDP general secretary, Martin Hagen, supports Kubicki’s decision to move the Brandmauer Overton window. “Attempts to keep the AfD small using the Brandmauer and exclusion have obviously failed. I’m in favour of a different approach,” Hagen said.

FDP parliamentary group leader Henning Höne has reservations. Ahead of the party conference, Höne said “I don’t want any normalisation of the AfD” and that he wanted “absolutely no” cooperation with the far-right party.

Why does the Brandmauer exist?

The Brandmauer is based on the principle that democratic parties should not cooperate with parties which threaten democracy and the fundamental rights outlined in the German constitution (Grundgesetz).

German history has numerous examples of cross-party cooperation to prevent extreme parties from gaining power. The idea resurfaced following the AfD's founding in 2013 and the party's growing popularity.

In May 2025, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), concluded that the AfD’s “ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order”. 

This understanding of who is German is incompatible with the constitution because the AfD seeks to “exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus to assign them a legally devalued status."

More specifically, the agency outlined that the AfD does not consider residents and citizens with a “migration background from predominantly Muslim countries” to be equal to other German citizens.

The AfD challenged this conclusion, and in February 2026, a German court issued a temporary injunction which prevents the BfV from referring to the party as a “right-wing extremist” group.

The party has ties to neo-Nazi groups, and three of its regional divisions have already been officially labelled as “extremist” by German courts.

Which German parties stick to the firewall?

Despite the Brandmauer, German politics has already seen many democratic parties cooperate with the AfD at the municipal level, particularly in eastern federal states, where the far-right party is popular. 

One of the most significant examples was current Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s (CDU) decision in January 2025 to accept the AfD’s support to pass two non-binding immigration-restriction motions in the Bundestag.

A recent study by the Berlin Social Science Centre found that between 2019 and 2024, in eastern federal states, the AfD received support from almost all mainstream parties. In cases of cooperation with the AfD, the CDU participated 62 percent of the time, FDP 50 percent, SPD 38 percent, and Greens/The Left Party on one of every four occasions.