HANOVER, Germany – Germany’s Free Democrats have a score to settle with Angela Merkel.

Rising from the ashes of the worst election result in the party's history, the Free Democrats — also known as the liberals — are expected to stage a comeback in Sunday's parliamentary election, and could end up in the familiar role of kingmaker.

If both parties perform slightly better than currently predicted on election night, the FDP, now polling fourth or fifth with about 9 percent, could give Merkel’s conservatives — currently on 36 percent support — just enough Bundestag seats to form a governing coalition.

However, the party's leaders have little reason to make things easy for the chancellor, blamed by many of them for their humiliating exit from parliament in 2013 after four years as Merkel's junior coalition partner. Many in the FDP feel they paid the price for failing to force the chancellor to accept the pro-business reforms they had promised to their voters when joining her coalition back in 2009.

“After the 2009 election, the party was primarily interested in getting [government] posts,” said Christian Dürr, a member of the FDP’s Präsidium (its 13-member inner circle). “Today, this is different.”

“Above all, we want to push through our own demands," he told POLITICO. "That’s what’s driving us and if we don’t achieve this in coalition talks, they won’t end in a positive result.”

Under the charismatic leadership of 38-year-old Christian Lindner, the party has revived its fortunes by rebranding as an urban, pro-business alternative to the chancellor's conservatives and their biggest rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD) led by Martin Schulz. Lindner has had some success with the message that after four years in a "grand coalition," any distinction between Merkel's party and the SDP has become blurred.

“When Frau Merkel and Herr Schulz faced each other in the TV debate, it was no duel — it was a job interview,” Lindner told a cheering audience in a packed theater in the center of Hanover last week. “Herr Schulz applied to become Frau Merkel’s next clerk.”

Lindner began his speech by taking off his jacket and tie “so that you can recognize me” — a light-hearted reference to the hundreds of billboards across Germany that show him in slick black-and-white portraits.

Speaking freely for over an hour in what resembled a TED talk more than a campaign speech, Lindner said his mission during the last four years had been to rebuild the party as a voice of the political center.

However, neither the hip setting of a run-down 1920s theater nor the youth of the audience — with the majority of listeners under 30 years old — could disguise the fact that some of his core policy demands situate the FDP firmly to the right of Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Founded in 1948 to revive the liberal party tradition of pre-World War II Germany, the FDP has been part of six different German governments, spending more than four decades as junior coalition partner to either the conservatives or the Social Democrats.

Traditionally an advocate of privacy protection, the party argues for keeping the role of the state limited while supporting globalization and free markets; high-income entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals such as lawyers and doctors have long been the bedrock of FDP support.

Red lines

“When it comes to migration policy, the FDP has never been as conservative as today under Lindner,” said a senior FDP official from the 2009-2013 administration, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Lindner says a precondition for taking the party into another coalition would be a commitment to toughen up rules on asylum in Germany and speed up deportations of people whose claims are rejected.

Speaking to POLITICO on the sidelines of the event in Hanover, the party leader said that on European policy, the red line was his party's refusal to accept a common budget for the eurozone funded by taxes that currently go into national budgets, as mooted by French President Emmanuel Macron.

“We don’t begrudge Mr. Macron and all European partners their success,” Lindner said, “But [a eurozone budget] would be a sort of permanent fiscal equalization scheme and a transfer union that would endanger the future of Europe.”

The message the FDP has been sending out to Merkel’s conservatives over the last couple of weeks is that they’re generally willing to compromise in coalition talks, but when it comes to their red lines, it's all or nothing this time.

“We don’t want to go into a coalition in which we have no say,” said FDP Präsidium member Dürr, adding that now all members of the leadership agree on that, whereas “this unity did not exist” in 2009.

Back then, leader Guido Westerwelle led his party to its best result in history, scoring almost 15 percent of the national vote, and he emerged from coalition talks with Merkel as Germany’s foreign minister.

The deal he struck with Merkel, however, dismissed many core liberal demands — above all, the FDP’s central campaign promise to bring down taxes significantly.

In the two years that followed, the FDP collapsed, losing members and plummeting in opinion polls. It didn't help that the party replaced Westerwelle as party leader with then-Economy Minister Philipp Rösler in 2011.

“The leadership was constantly fighting with each other,” the former FDP government official said, “and Rösler failed to keep the party united.”

When the next election in 2013 came closer, “Merkel had become really annoyed by us,” the official said, “and her conservatives ended up campaigning heavily against the FDP.”

Job prospects

On election night in 2013, the FDP scored almost 10 percentage points less than four years earlier, failing for the first time in party history to clear the 5 percent hurdle to enter the Bundestag.

Shell-shocked, the FDP had to let hundreds of employees go, many of whom left for well-paid jobs in the private sector. One of them told POLITICO this week he was not willing to “to give up my open-ended work contract only to perhaps end up again with no job in four years.”

Other FDP officials say the number of people signaling their availability for new positions in parliament or government is skyrocketing.

After its years in the political wilderness, however, the FDP suffers from poor visibility in Germany, with half the respondents in a Forsa survey earlier this month saying they don't even know party chief Lindner.

The vast majority of those who could end up in prime positions after the September 24 vote are newcomers to the political scene in Berlin, which could become a liability in coalition talks with Merkel’s conservatives, who have been in power for 12 years.

New line-up

Meanwhile, speculation is running high on which senior FDP figures could be in the running for high-profile coalition posts.

Wolfgang Kubicki, a pugnacious 65-year-old lawyer from northern Germany and one of three deputy party chiefs, is expected to play a major role, according to conversations with party officials.

His 41-year-old co-deputy Katja Suding, a charismatic former PR adviser who has led the FDP’s parliamentary group in the Hamburg state parliament for six years, is said to have equally good prospects, while fewer officials expect the party’s third deputy chief, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, from North Rhine-Westphalia, to play a major role.

When it comes to speculation about FDP officials moving from Brussels to Berlin, two names figure prominently: Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the 50-year-old European Parliament vice president whom some in the party consider a potential foreign minister, and Michael Theurer, a 50-year-old economist and MEP.

"If we can't make a difference then it is our responsibility to go into the opposition" — Christian Lindner

Marco Buschmann, a 40-year-old longtime confidant of Lindner, is expected to be less visible but equally influential. He has been pulling strings behind the scenes as the party’s federal manager for three years, is currently involved in setting up the new FDP group in the Bundestag and could end up as the chief whip.

Another potential FDP minister if the liberals end up in government is Nicola Beer, a 47-year-old regional MP from Hesse who has been the FDP’s secretary-general since 2013.

Michael Link is one of the few people in the FDP's current leadership who has direct experience in the Berlin Regierungsviertel (government district). He spent almost two decades in the Bundestag, where he worked as a staffer for 10 years before being elected as an MP in 2005.

Bear necessities

In recent days, FDP officials have suggested the party should stake a claim to the finance ministry, although it is unclear whether Lindner or someone else would take the post, if it were available.

But other party officials are eager to avoid the impression that they are jumping the gun before the German people cast their votes on Sunday — or, as Dürr phrased it, “Don't sell the fur before shooting the bear.”

If current polls prove correct, the FDP’s best chance of ending up in government with the conservatives is as part of a three-way coalition which would also include the Greens, a combination known as a "Jamaica coalition" because of the parties' colors (black for the CDU, yellow for the FDP and green for the Greens).

That would mean sitting down to negotiate not just with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, but also with another party with strong principles — making it even more difficult for the FDP to defend its red lines in coalition talks.

Party chief Lindner has not explicitly excluded a Jamaica coalition, though he has said he "can't imagine it." However, it is common practice among German party leaders to avoid going into the election talking about potential future partnerships, as they prefer to focus on what their party alone has to offer.

"I promise you that the FDP will only go into a government if we can truly make a difference," Lindner told the audience in Hanover. "If we can't make a difference then it is our responsibility to go into the opposition and demand what's necessary from the opposition."