FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai warns of additional burdens for companies in Germany. And explains why he firmly believes that the Liberals will achieve double-digit results in the 2025 federal election.
Germany’s economy is not moving. The job market is booming because there is a shortage of skilled workers everywhere. At the same time, however, all economists are warning: There will be no growth this year – and if something doesn’t change quickly, it will probably stay that way in the next few years.
One person who is very concerned about this is FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai. He and the Liberals have recognized that their ideas for better economic policy can not only make the country fit again, but ideally also lead the FDP out of its current low in the polls.
Djir-Sarai welcomes people on the third floor of the Hans-Dietrich-Genscher-Haus in Berlin-Mitte, the party headquarters of the FDP. A large, bright office, black leather sofa, abstract paintings in blue and yellow, the once classic party colors, hanging on the walls. “I left everything like that when I moved in,” says Djir-Sarai, which sounds like: No time for that kind of thing, there’s a lot to do. Especially in times like these, which are also characterized by the escalation in the Middle East, the region in which Djir-Sarai grew up for the first ten years of his life.
t-online: Mr. Djir-Sarai, you were born in Tehran, you have always sharply criticized the Iranian regime – and now, after the attack on Israel, you say: Europe’s and Germany’s Iran policy was naive. Why did we allow ourselves to be lulled by the mullahs?
Sesame Djir-Sarai: We in Europe have never really understood how the Iranian regime works. And that’s why we underestimated what its true intentions are: Iran wants to destabilize the Middle East. The mullahs want to wipe out Israel. Meanwhile, we in Europe have spent too long just trying to save the nuclear deal. That was a mistake.
Should the nuclear agreement be canceled now?
No, I wouldn’t go that far. But we still need a different Iran policy, a completely new strategy for how we want to deal with the regime.
The most important step is to put the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the EU terror list. This is the only way they can be directly sanctioned, for example by freezing their bank accounts in the EU. This hits Iran in a sensitive spot and hurts more than, say, breaking off diplomatic relations. One thing must be clear to us: what happens there also has very concrete consequences for us, here in Germany.
The refugee movements in recent years, for example from Syria, are crucially linked to the actions of Iran, which supported the Syrian dictator Assad in the civil war. Basically: We will have to pay more attention to the Middle East if the Americans turn more to the Pacific region and China. And by the way, we can only achieve this as an economically strong country.
This is exactly what you are particularly committed to at the moment: you want the “economic turnaround” and at the same time complain about the backlog of reforms, as if the FDP had not been part of the federal government for two and a half years. How do you explain your own inaction to citizens?
This formulation is too exaggerated for me and misses the real point: The current economic misery has its origins in the last ten years or so, which were characterized by CDU/CSU-led governments. The Merkel years were expensive for our country. Back then, reforms were missed that are hindering our growth today. We therefore have a very clear goal: The FDP wants to preserve prosperity in Germany. Prosperity is not a law of nature, it does not fall from heaven. We have to do something for it, we have to work for it. That’s what we stand for, that’s our task in the coalition. If the FDP doesn’t do it, then no one will.
The Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck has anyway set the same goal.
It’s good that we share the analysis. But the conclusions are different: We liberals want to make Germany competitive again and improve the general conditions overall. In concrete terms, this means fewer taxes and fees, less bureaucracy, more skilled workers, better work incentives, more affordable energy and stable finances. That’s what we stand for. Because economic power is the basis for prosperity and defensiveness, for freedom and security. Mr. Habeck wants to subsidize individual industries with tax money, which we don’t think is helpful.
