Germany set for snap election as Olaf Scholz loses confidence vote

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his ministers will stay in a caretaker role until the next government is formed in February.

Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag on Monday (local time), paving the way for early elections that look likely to end his tenure as chancellor of Germany.

The “traffic light” coalition between Mr Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens broke down last month, leaving the chancellor without a governing majority.

After the vote Mr Scholz asked President Steinmeier to dissolve parliament. Mr Scholz and his ministers will stay in a caretaker role until the next government is formed. In the timeline the chancellor set out after talks with Mr Steinmeier and the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), the main opposition group, the president would formally dissolve the Bundestag on December 27.

“If the president follows my proposal, voters will be able to elect a new Bundestag on February 23,” Mr Scholz told journalists after he submitted his request for a confidence vote last week. In the vote, 207 MPs voted in favour of Mr Scholz – far short of the absolute majority of 367 votes he needed.

By contrast, 394 MPs voted against and 116 abstained.

The result ends months of political gridlock in which the coalition parties squabbled over economic policy and rigid constitutional budget rules as Germany’s economy struggled.

As the debate began in parliament, Mr Scholz outlined plans for massive spending on security, business and social welfare but Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader and favourite to become the next chancellor, demanded to know why he had not taken those steps in the past, asking: “Were you on another planet?” Mr Scholz argued that his government had made great progress in the past three years, including boosting spending on the German armed forces.

“It is high time to invest powerfully and decisively in Germany,” he said, warning of Russia’s war in Ukraine that “a highly-armed nuclear power is waging war in Europe just two hours’ flight from here”.

Merz said that Mr Scholz had left the country in “one of the biggest economic crises of the post-war era”. He said: “You had your chance but did not use it … You, Mr Mr Scholz, do not deserve confidence.”

Confidence votes are rare in German politics, which has had remarkable stability since the inception of the German Federal Republic in 1949. The ballot is only the sixth confidence vote and will prompt only the fourth early election since the Second World War.

Mr Scholz’s party trails Merz’s CDU in the polls by about 14 points, at about 17 per cent. The hard-right AfD is also polling higher than the SPD, at 18 per cent to 20 per cent.

The Times