He’s Always Been Like This

Christian Lindner—longtime leader of Germany’s FDP, the liberal party, a man whose entire political brand rests on being conspicuously sleek in a milieu that rewards conspicuous sleekness—did not arrive at his self-regard accidentally. There’s a 1997 clip from a long-forgotten German youth show called "100 Grad" that aired on Deutsche Welle, the international broadcaster, and it shows a teenage Lindner arriving at school in a rented limousine wearing a tie.

Not metaphorically. An actual rented limousine. An actual tie. For school.

By 2017, Lindner was running FDP campaign ads in high-contrast black and white—rapid cuts, pink lettering, carefully calibrated energy, the whole thing designed to signal that this was a young, modern, digital politics for young, modern, digital people. The ads went viral in the way that perfectly crafted image artifacts tend to go viral: half genuine admiration for the execution, half incredulous laughter at the content.

Watching the 1997 footage, you understand that nothing changed. The teenage Lindner in that clip is already performing a version of himself, already working the room, already certain of his own importance in a context that mostly calls for showing up and enduring. That level of self-belief in a teenager is either a superpower or a pathology—watching it from a distance, you can’t quite tell which, and you suspect he couldn’t either.

What’s genuinely funny—not politically convenient funny, actually funny—is the continuity. Most public figures have a before and after, some point at which the constructed persona calcified out of whatever they used to be. Lindner appears to have arrived fully formed. The limousine was always going to happen. Someone just had to find the footage.