Christian Lindner and Franca Lehfeldt are expecting a baby

FDP leader Christian Lindner is currently in a crisis professionally – but things couldn’t be going better for him privately. „Bild“ and the German Press Agency learned from the couple’s confidants that Lindner (45) and his wife, the journalist Franca Lehfeldt (35), are expecting their first child together. Lindner himself did not want to comment on this when asked.

According to the newspaper, the baby is due to be born in early spring 2025. This is the first child for both of them. Lindner and Lehfeldt, who left the news channel WELT TV at the end of October 2023 to work as a freelance journalist, got married on Sylt in the summer of 2022.

“Love comes first”

The relationship became public in July 2018. Lindner and Lehfeldt came to Bayreuth together for the start of the Richard Wagner Festival. Lindner often expressed his love for his relationship with Lehfeldt. “Love comes first,” he said in an interview with the magazine “Bunte” last year. “We usually see each other every day – if I can, I come home long distances at night.” When asked about family planning, Lindner said: “We can easily imagine having children. But here, as in politics, the principle applies: announce less and deliver more.”

However, the FDP federal chairman has experienced difficult times professionally in the past few weeks. On November 6th, Lindner was dismissed as Federal Finance Minister by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD). The coalition of the SPD, Greens and FDP broke up, and new elections are due in February.

Almost three months before the planned federal election, the FDP is in a deep crisis, primarily due to an internal strategy paper. Lindner called his party’s working paper published on Thursday by the FDP after previous media research, which described the Liberals’ possible exit from the coalition with military terms such as “D-Day” and “open field battle”, “stylistically unconvincing” on Saturday on ARD. It was never discussed in political committees and he had no knowledge of it. But he doesn’t blame the employees who drafted the paper. “I bear overall responsibility for the FDP and I am committed to that.”