On Thursday, he argued that no other country supports Ukraine via its regular budget, saying that Germany “scraped together anything it could find in the budget” after Mr Lindner’s insistence that Germany stick to its debt brake rules.
“If you think you can just sweat this [crisis] out, you’ll set the country on fire,” he said on Thursday.
Mr Lindner argued that Mr Scholz offered to give €3 billion but “what the people of the Ukraine need is not an extra €3 billion but the weapons systems they need to defend their freedom”.
Instead, he said the €3 billion was a “pretext to take on an extra €15 billion in public debt”.
“I fear that not everyone in our country has yet understood just how dramatic the [economic] situation is and that some people haven’t understood how little support was left for this government,” he added.
Mr Lindner and Mr Scholz have knocked heads repeatedly over how to divide up the government’s reduced resources.
After Mr Lindner made a series of demands last week including tax cuts and a pension reform, the gulf became unbridgeable.
In the wake of his government’s collapse, Mr Scholz is now facing demands by opposition leaders to call a confidence vote as soon as next week rather than in 2025 in order to hold snap elections in January.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative CDU party, accused Mr Scholz of wasting time and said Germany “cannot afford to have a government without a majority for months”.
Mr Scholz said on Thursday he would call a vote of confidence in January 2025 which would pave the way for elections in March if, as expected, he loses the vote.
He has said that he wants to try and pass a budget first.
Markus Söder, the powerful state leader of Bavaria, has also demanded immediate elections.
He reportedly warned his CSU party via video call that if no solution is found to the current crisis “not only will Germany fail, but so will our democracy”.