FDP General Secretary Marco Buschmann has admitted that the term “D-Day” might have been mentioned in strategy sessions of the Free Democrats, possibly. “I can’t swear that no one in some meeting in the last few months didn’t bring up such a term” he told the Funke Media Group newspapers in an interview.
Such metaphors are also used by other politicians. “Think of Olaf Scholz and his ‘bazooka’, a rocket launcher, or take a look at Angela Merkel’s biography, where she talks about an open field battle between the CDU/CSU and the Schröder government” he said.
“We should apply human standards when an employee uses such terms in their personal notes” he added. The paper titled “D-Day” that outlined a strategy for the event of a coalition breakdown, he said, was the first he saw, when the FDP published it itself.
Former Federal Executive Director Carsten Reymann had assured him that he had prepared the paper “for himself as a to-do list for the worst-case scenario” and that it was never presented in any political decision-making round, Buschmann emphasized. “We discussed scenarios, but none of them was called D-Day.”
Buschmann rejected speculation that Lindner had commissioned the paper for the coalition breakdown. “What is true is that there was a willingness in the FDP leadership to end the coalition if better politics for our country did not come about. The federal executive office had to prepare for that” he said. “I myself was once federal executive director. Christian Lindner gives his leadership a lot of decision-making freedom. I would have never dared to present an unfinished, half-baked product like this internal working paper, which is now being talked about so much, to a federal chairman.”
When asked if there was no alternative to Lindner at the party’s helm, Buschmann replied: “No one is irreplaceable, but Christian Lindner is a very strong chairman with a high integration capacity within the party.