Germany has voted.

[JackRiddler]

35. No. The FDP are liberals.

Liberalism originally meant laisez-faire economics in a representative democratic state. Economically it meant the reverse of what it means today in the United States. Of course, the U.S. understanding of liberals as supportive of strong state regulation is largely nominal. Most American leaders labeled as liberals, if not their base, are committed to what is now called neo-liberal policy and have, e.g., supported measures for corporate deregulation. (We'll see what happens with the TPP vote.) In most places in the world, liberal still refers to what Americans now call "economic conservatives" (who are actually radical liberals, in the old sense). Parties named Liberal tend to be center-right, like in Australia. The FDP have always been raging libertarians, during their entire existence, though they are permissive on social issues and immigration, unlike the Australian Liberals who are more like Tancredo. (In another one of these historic word-flips, libertarian was originally coined as the self-identification of anarchist socialists like Emma Goldman, but let's not get into that.) Of course, to right-wing Americans a liberal is a dirty commie agent. Even among centrist pundits liberal is absurdly used as a 1:1 synonym for leftist, since the hegemonic discourse generally refuses to acknowledge the existence of anything to the left of Hillary Clinton except to call it extreme. Many leftists, meanwhile, have mounted a comeback for progressive rather than liberal as a more clear reference to the (soft) left politics represented, say, by 1960s U.S. liberals, or Al Franken. And of course we've seen the 20-year rise of the liberal humanitarian imperialists, who also are not really new under the sun but re-taking up "the white man's burden." The paradoxes around this word never cease.