FDP veteran Baum accuses party leadership of corona populism
Released on 07.06.2022
- "Failed disastrously": Gerhart Baum. Photo: Britta Pedersen/dpa
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Reckoning with his own party: Former Interior Minister Gerhart Baum is harsh on the FDP’s pandemic policy. The Liberals would have advocated loosening the corona virus, "even if it was not responsible."
Berlin.
The former FDP top politician Gerhart Baum has sharply criticized the Corona course of the current party leadership and partly accused her of irresponsibility.
Distrust of state intervention is "an indispensable characteristic of liberal politics", said the 1978-year-old former Federal Minister of the Interior (89-1982) the editorial network Germany. "But this must not lead to the necessary responsibility for the common good falling by the wayside."
The FDP was in the recent state elections in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia " also because of their pandemic policy", as Baum put it, "failed disastrously". Nevertheless, FDP Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki announced that they would be continued in the autumn, he criticized.
The FDP had campaigned for the protective measures to be relaxed, "even if it was not responsible like in the fall 2020 when the hesitation had to be paid for with a lockdown". The FDP policy was "at times a piece of populism that voters did not follow," said Baum. "They simply could not imagine that all other democratic parties, all federal states and science were wrong."
Within the coalition, there is increasing argument about which corona protection measures to be set for the fall. The FDP in particular is still on the brakes. Leading liberals want the corona measures to be assessed professionally first. Evidence-based decisions could only be made on the basis of a corresponding report. (dpa)
