The Free Voters unanimously nominated their party leader Hubert Aiwanger as the top candidate for the state elections on October 8th. Aiwanger had previously outlined his goals for the coming legislative period in a 45-minute speech at the party conference in Augsburg, massively attacking the traffic light government in the federal government and the Greens in the state.
“It is a great honor to me. I’ll fight with you for a good double-digit result,” he said after his election. For Aiwanger, it is already the fifth nomination as a top candidate for an election. He led the party three times in state elections and twice in federal elections. While the Free Voters in Bavaria have long been established as a government force, they do not yet play a role in federal politics.
“We are the right group that needs to become even stronger,” said the Bavarian Vice Prime Minister on Saturday in his keynote speech. While the traffic light government in the federal government is making plans in back rooms that people rightly perceive as “mess” and the CSU has also taken the wrong turn when it comes to decisions about using firewood for heating, the independent voters are the reliable doers, stressed Aiwanger.
Politicians should not blindly follow ideologues, but must listen to common sense, this is the role of the free voters, who have proved to be the corrective of the CSU over the past five years. The country’s future isn’t the climate adhesives or insect eaters riding cargo bikes, but start-up entrepreneurs and young masters.
With a view to the goals for the coming legislative period, Aiwanger emphasized that it is not a matter of “reinventing everything”. Rather, it is time to readjust things that have already been initiated and to “introduce new things in comprehensible steps”. Bavaria and Germany would have to “go step by step from the fossil age into the future” and would have to remain an industrial location.
In 2018, Aiwanger’s party got 11.6 percent of the vote and subsequently entered a coalition with the CSU. In surveys, the Free Voters have been consistently at values between ten and eleven percent for months. The CSU and Free Voters have repeatedly spoken out in favor of continuing their coalition. The resolution of the 75-page draft of the election program is also on the agenda at the one-day party conference in Augsburg.
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