FDP General Secretary Marco Buschmann has admitted that the term “D-Day” may have been used in FDP meetings. “I can’t put my hand in the fire for the fact that someone hasn’t thrown such a term around at some point in the last few months,” he told the newspapers of the Funke media group.
However, other politicians would also use such metaphors, said Buschmann. “Think of Olaf Scholz’s bazooka, a rocket launcher. Or take a look at Angela Merkel's biography: There she speaks of an open battle between the CDU/CSU and the Schröder government.” “Human standards” must be applied “when an employee commits himself to this in his personal notes Terms served.”
The Secretary General said he saw the so-called “D-Day” paper “for the first time when the FDP itself published it.” Federal Managing Director Carsten Reymann, who has since resigned, assured him that he had prepared the paper “for himself as a list of tasks in case of emergency”. It was not presented in any political decision-making round in which he took part. “We talked about events, but none of them were called D-Day.”
“No person is irreplaceable”
Research by ZEIT and the South German newspaper had published excerpts from a multi-page paper from the FDP headquarters, which show that the FDP had been preparing to leave the traffic light coalition for months. The paper contained military terms such as “D-Day” and “pitch battle,” which was met with widespread criticism. Die FDP published the document under pressure from the research itself.
As a result, Federal Managing Director Carsten Reymann — who said he was the author of the paper — and Secretary General Bijan Djir-Sarai resigned. Djir-Sarai, Lindner and other members of the party leadership claim not to have known the paper.
