In December 2010, she was nominated as the leading candidate of the FDP to the 2011 Hamburg state election.

Under Suding's leadership, the FDP managed a comeback to the Bürgerschaft with 6.7% of the votes, making it the best result since 1974[4] and giving them nine of the 121 seats.

[6] In 2015, she was elected the party's deputy chairperson (alongside Wolfgang Kubicki and Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann), this time under the leadership of chairman Christian Lindner.

Suding was a FDP delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2012 and 2017.

In 2016, she announced that she would leave state politics and instead run for a parliamentary seat in the 2017 national elections.

[citation needed] In September 2020, Suding announced that she would not stand in the 2021 federal elections but instead resign from active politics by the end of the parliamentary term.