[9] Lindner was from 2000 initially 'spokesman for Intergenerational Affairs, Family and Integration' and then from 2005 to 2009 was also vice chairman of the FDP parliamentary group in the parliament and spokesman for Innovation, Science and Technology.
In the negotiations to form a coalition government following the 2009 federal elections, he was part of the FDP delegation in the working group on families, integration of immigrants and culture, led by Maria Böhmer and Hans-Joachim Otto.
[16] Ahead of the 2014 European elections, Lindner and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte served as 'mediators' between Olli Rehn and Guy Verhofstadt, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe's candidates for the presidency of the European Commission;[17] eventually, the candidates agreed to jointly lead the ALDE's campaign for elections, with Verhofstadt running to succeed José Manuel Barroso.
[19] Lindner was a FDP delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2017, where he endorsed the government's candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
[21] Following the 2021 German federal election, the FDP agreed to enter government with the Greens and Social Democrats, as part of a traffic light coalition led by Olaf Scholz.
[24][25] On 17 May 2022, Lindner said he is "politically open to the idea of seizing" the frozen foreign-exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia —which amount to over $300 billion— to cover the costs of rebuilding Ukraine after the war.
[27] Experts criticize that the new agency lacks the authority to seizure suspicious assets by administrative order and the exclusion of tax-related offences from its jurisdiction, according to a draft published until September 2023.
Robert Habeck, among others, thought that this might stress the ruling coalition,[32] and this had already impacted the promised Diehl IRIS-T system, which turned out not to have been funded by Germany after all because of the restrictions put in place by Lindner.
[33] In September 2024, Lindner agreed with an FDP position paper that proposed cuts to the social benefits for asylum seekers, as well as designating some North African countries as "safe" for ease of repatriation.
[52] In early 2015, an impassioned response to heckling by Lindner, defending entrepreneurs and startup culture, made it onto newspaper front pages and became one of the most watched political speeches in months.
Lindner was speaking before the state legislature in North Rhine-Westphalia about the importance of entrepreneurship and how failed entrepreneurs deserve a second chance when a Social Democratic member in the audience heckled: "That [failure] is something you have experience in."
The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel said the rant offered a welcome contrast to the "persistent fog of alternative-less Merkelism" that characterized debate in the Bundestag.
Shortly after the 2017 elections, Lindner ruled out taking on new debt to manage the balancing act of cutting income taxes and increasing investment on digital infrastructure.
He criticized outgoing Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble for not being tough enough on Greece and not cutting income taxes for middle-class workers.
They called his positions an "accumulation of conservative clichés" from a "bygone era" that had become obsolete "after three decades of crisis on the financial markets, in geopolitics [and] in the environmental field".