"Party leadership needs to be more of a team game," vice-chairman of the Free Democrats (FDP), Andreas Pinkwart said in an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper. "The FDP needs to have more faces in the public sphere."

Pinkwart suggested a few colleagues - including his superior, party chairman Christian Lindner, and former foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher - as examples of FDP politicians who could handle greater responsibility.

The FDP is losing ground hand over fist in opinion polls, and party leader Guido Westerwelle is on the defensive after his controversial criticism of a recent Constitutional Court ruling that the German welfare system doesn't do enough to help the long-term unemployed.

The party's loss of seven percentage points - almost half of its support - in opinion polls since September's general election show that voters are currently "very disappointed with the FDP," Pinkwart said.

Westerwelle fighting back

The February survey also showed that only 25 percent of people think the new coalition between Chancellor Merkel's Christian Democrats and the FDP is performing better than the former "Grand Coalition" of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Meanwhile, 55 percent of those questioned said they thought the former administration had performed better.

Westerwelle, facing a torrent of criticism from opposing parties as well, has defended his earlier comments, where he stated that promising people prosperity even if they didn't work for it would encourage Germans to indulge in "latter-day Roman decadence."

"Someone who works must have more than someone who doesn't," Westerwelle told the German daily Die Welt. "You've got to be allowed to say that. Anything else would be socialism."

The German Constitutional Court ruled that Germany's welfare system for the long-term unemployed, Hartz IV, did not provide enough money to keep people above the poverty line. Essentially, the court judged that Hartz IV payments were insufficient to uphold human rights, and should therefore be increased.

"The people criticizing me most loudly are the ones who botched Hartz IV in the first place," Westerwelle told the mass-publication Sunday tabloid Bild am Sonntag. "At the end of the day, Hartz IV is the brainchild of the Social Democrats and the Greens," he said, referring to the coalition which ruled Germany from 1998 until 2005.

Critics spare no words

Perhaps the harshest criticism of Westerwelle has come from the former party chairman of the Christian Democrats, Heiner Geissler, who picked up on the FDP leader's reference to Roman opulence.

"Latter-day Roman decadence was symbolized by the super rich who, after enjoying their hedonistic feasts, bathed in ass' milk and then named Emperor Caligula - an ass - as their consul."

In the interview with newspaper die Welt, Geissler went on to say Foreign Minister Westerwelle's analogy was therefore true, insofar as "an ass became foreign minister" 100 days ago.

Westerwelle's own party, however, has closed ranks on this issue. Even the relative dissident Andreas Pinkwart praised his party leader's bravery.

Pinkwart said Westerwelle's comments on Hartz IV voiced "what the millions of German workers and middle class people, who keep things running day after day, are really thinking."

msh/dpa/AFP

Editor: Toma Tasovac