Liberals meet to avoid political oblivion at polls

Germany's Liberal Free Democrats (FDP), the junior partners in Dr Helmut Kohl's centre-right coalition government, meet in Stuttgart today amid growing signs that the party faces extinction at September's federal election.

The Liberals's traditional Epiphany conference has been overshadowed by internal arguments over policy direction, with the former leader, Mr Hans Dietrich Genscher, complaining that the party has drifted too far from its liberal roots.

Opinion polls suggest that the FDP will fail to win the 5 per cent of votes it needs to ensure a return to the Bundestag after September's election. The Greens are now the undisputed third force in German politics and many educated, well-heeled voters are abandoning the Liberals for the environmental party.

Mr Genscher, who remains honorary chairman, accused his successors of making a fundamental mistake in describing the FDP as "the party of the better-off".

The current leadership is dominated by zealous believers in the free market doctrines espoused by President Reagan and Lady Thatcher in the 1980s. But there is little support among the German electorate for the wholesale destruction of the social market and most voters perceive the FDP as a useless appendage to Dr Kohl's Christian Democrats.

"The FDP must be associated with more policies. But that will only happen if the party leadership concerns itself with these issues," according to Ms Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the former federal justice minister who resigned in 1995 when the FDP backed Dr Kohl's plans to allow the police to bug private homes.

Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger wants the party to take a stand on such issues as abortion, the neo-Nazi scandals in the Bundeswehr and the rights of children.

The party chairman, Mr Wolfgang Gerhardt, and the general secretary, Mr Guido Westerwelle, prefer to concentrate on persuading their colleagues in government to cut taxes. Voters appear unimpressed and the party's long-term prospects appear grim.

One problem is that the FDP no longer attracts the bright, ambitious young politicians who once flocked to the tiny party in the hope of swift advancement. As the gap between right and left narrows, there may be less space in the German political spectrum for such a party and, after almost 30 years in government, the Liberals may be heading for a long political wilderness.

"We are facing a tough year," said Count Otto Lambsdorff, FDP honourary chairman and a former economics minister. "But all those who doubt we will survive should remember that the death knell has often tolled for us before," he told ZDF television. "We survived then and will survive now. The FDP will not disappear."