A person's reading preferences can say a lot about his or her character. In the case of Guido Westerwelle, leader-elect of Germany's small but ambitious Free Democratic Party (FDP), that is certainly true. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, his favorite fictional heroes, the 39-year-old stands out for his quick wit, infectious optimism and resourcefulness in the face of adversity — qualities that might well help his ailing party back into power.
Although in the past the Free Democrats and their free-market platform rarely captured more than 10% of the national vote, they have been out of office for only 10 of the past 51 years. By timely alliances with Germany's two larger parties, the CDU and the SDP, they managed to share power. It was only in 1998 that the FDP relinquished its kingmaker role to the environmentalist Greens, the current junior coalition party in Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's center-left government.
Westerwelle, who trained as a lawyer, has been on a quest to restore the FDP as Germany's third political force ever since he became party general secretary in 1994. Where Wolfgang Gerhardt, 57, the FDP's lackluster chairman incumbent, avoided publicity, the ever cheerful Westerwelle actively seeks the limelight, appearing widely on TV and radio. Eager to appeal to young voters in particular, Westerwelle — who co-founded the FDP's youth organization, Young Liberals, in the early 1980s — recently even wrote a music review for Playboy and turned up casually dressed on the set of Big Brother, Germany's blockbuster reality-show — moves that earned him the title "pop star of the FDP."
Westerwelle's political message is designed to play to the gallery, too, both inside and outside the party. He calls for "more freedom, less state," demands lower taxes and fewer subsidies, advocates equal rights for homosexual couples and promotes reform of the education system. Intent on eliminating the FPD's elitist image — its slogan in the 1994 election campaign was "party of the well-to-do" — he projects an image of the party as a place not just for the few "who have made it" but for the many "who want to make it." Westerwelle told a recent FDP conference in Stuttgart that the FDP would be "a party for everyone."
While Westerwelle's short-term goal is to promote the FDP's chances in polls in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate in March — the FDP is currently represented in only 5 of Germany's 16 state parliaments — his paramount aim is to help his party back to power in next year's general election. Signaling that the FDP might consent to an alliance with Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD), Westerwelle confidently announced in Stuttgart that the party would march "on its own" into the 2002 election instead of joining forces with its long-time coalition partner, the Christian Democrats (CDU), with which it had governed Germany for 16 years. This is a potentially risky move, since the FDP prospered in the past because a vote for it was regarded as crucial to keeping the CDU at the helm. Westerwelle will need all Tom Sawyer's salemanship and Huck Finn's ingenuity if he's to make his party so strong that, as he puts it, "there can be no government without" it.
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