“I wear these battle scars with pride,” jokes Free Democratic Party leader after getting smeared with foam at an election rally.
Germany’s former Finance Minister Christian Lindner was hit in the face with a fake cake at a campaign event for his Free Democratic Party (FDP) on Thursday.
As Lindner, leader of the FDP, was addressing his audience in the northern German city of Greifswald, a young woman appeared on stage near him and threw a plate topped with soap foam in his face.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t cream, just soap. At least you could have done that better, then I would have taken some of it,” Lindner said as he wiped most of the foam off his face, even throwing some back on the woman’s hair as security guards took her to the ground, according to a video clip of the incident.
According to the regional newspaper Nordkurier, Lindner even left some remains of the foam on his face. “I wear these battle scars with pride,” he said.
Lindner, who was at the center of coalition drama in Berlin that turned into a fully fledged government crisis and sparked an early election set for Feb. 23, is struggling to get his fiscally conservative party above the 5 percent threshold ― needed for a place in parliament.
According to polls, his party is stuck at 4 percent, trailing all the major parties and even the recently formed movement of Sahra Wagenknecht, which takes fringe left and right positions to attract voters from both edges of the political spectrum.
Adding to the party’s drama, the FDP itself has also fallen into internal crisis over Lindner’s decision to blow up the fragile three-party coalition led by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
According to an internal document, they intended to blame the left-leaning Social Democrats and Greens for the government’s failure — but after the scapegoating plan was revealed, several resignations within the party followed, including that of its secretary-general.
