[_k]

They had it coming, considering how the Greens (in the EU) were flip flopping on ACTA. Do you happen to know what German parties ALDE http://www.alde.eu/ is linked to ? They are pro ACTA, so it would be interesting to know whether they lost a few percentage points as well ?

[febeling]

FDP is member of ALDE, which is the liberal democrats party. They are in a historic low in the polls recently. They are also part of the federal government coalition right now.

The FDP has most of the time been a very small party in popular votes, but are still seen as very established, since they traditionally join a coalition with another larger party (recently mostly CDU/conservatives), and so becoming a deciding factor, more so than their share of the vote would suggest. At the same time they are in most elections in danger of not winning any seats at all, since most elections in Germany have a threshold of 5% as a minimum you need to gain any seat via the proportional vote mechanism.

[stfu]

Should be worth mentioning, that the German Ministry of Justice is held by the Alde/Fdp party. Her strong stand on civil liberties is more or less the only thing keeping Germany from implementing the European telecommunications data retention act.

[brazzy]

Claims to be liberal but mainly supports business interests? Who else but the FDP could that be?

And, yep:

http://www.alde.eu/alde-group/national-delegation-elected-me... Germany: LAMBSDORFF Alexander Graf, Freie Demokratische Partei

And the FDP is currently disintegrating so vociferously it's almost comical to watch. But supporting ACTA has only a small part in that, if any.

[dan85]

Yes, they support business interests. In European politics, "liberal" does not have the same meaning as in US.

[brazzy]

As a European, I know that. My point is that the FDP tends to support business interests far more than civil liberties, especially when the two collide, as with ACTA.

[nickik]

Its funny that the people who use the world liberal mean something completly diffrent of what it meant 100 years ago. They call themselfs libertarians now. FDP and simular parties often use state power to help spezial intresst groupes, witch means that they help businesses but they do not help the economy.