Germany’s centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote on Monday after weeks of turmoil, putting Europe’s biggest economy on the path to early elections on February 23.
The Bundestag vote, which Scholz had expected to lose, allows President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dissolve the legislature and formally order elections.
The crucial vote was followed by a heated debate in which political rivals exchanged angry accusations over the advance notice of the upcoming election campaign.
The embattled Scholze, 66, has fallen badly short of conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
After more than three years in power, Scholz ran into trouble when his dysfunctional three-party coalition collapsed on November 6, the day Donald Trump won re-election to the White House.
Political unrest has hit Germany as it struggles to revive a faltering economy hit by high energy prices and stiff competition from China.
Berlin also faces major geopolitical challenges as it confronts Russia over the Ukraine war and Trump’s imminent withdrawal amid heightened uncertainty over future NATO and trade relations.
Those threats were at the center of a heated debate between Scholz, Merz and other party leaders before the vote in the lower house, in which 207 MPs supported Scholz, 394 did not, while 116 MPs abstained.
When Scholz outlined his plan to spend massively on security, trade and social welfare, Merz wanted to know why he had not taken these steps in the past, and asked: “Were you on another planet? “
‘Deplorable situation’
Scholz argued that his government had increased spending on the armed forces which had been left “in a poor state” by previous CDU-led governments.
Scholz warned about Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying, “This is the right time to invest powerfully and decisively in Germany.”
But Merz hit back, saying that Scholz had left the country in “one of the biggest economic crises of the post-war era”.
“You had the chance, but you didn’t use it… You, Mr. Scholz, don’t deserve to be trusted”, Merz accused.
Merz, a former corporate lawyer who has never held a government leadership position, criticized the chancellor’s motley coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), left-leaning Greens and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Coalition discord over fiscal and economic issues reached a fever pitch when Scholz fired his rebellious FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner on 6 November.
Scholz on Monday again attacked Lindner for “weeks of sabotage” that broke the coalition and damaged “the reputation of democracy.”
Lindner’s departure from the FDP leaves Scholz running a minority government with the Greens, unable to pass major bills or a new budget.
‘Suspicious’
German politics in the post-war era was long, stable, and dominated by two large parties, the CDU–CSU coalition and the SPD, with the smaller FDP often playing the role of kingmaker.
The Greens emerged in the 1980s, but the political landscape has been further fractured by the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a blow to a country whose dark history dating back to World War II has long emboldened right-wing extremists. Making parties taboo. ,
The AfD has evolved from a Eurosceptic fringe party into a major political force over the past decade, when it opposed Merkel’s open-door policy to migrants, and now enjoys the support of about 18 percent of voters.
While other parties have committed to a “firewall” of non-cooperation with the AfD, some have borrowed from its anti-immigration rhetoric.
Following the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, some CDU lawmakers immediately demanded that the approximately one million Syrian refugees in Germany return to their country.
The election comes at a time when “the German model is in crisis,” said Claire Demesme, a political scientist at Berlin-based Sciences Po Paris.
He told AFP that Germany’s prosperity was based on “cheap energy imported from Russia, security policy outsourced to the United States, and exports and subcontracting to China”.
Demesme said the country is now in an extensive process of restructuring which is “creating fear within society which is reflected at the political level”.
“We may see a political discussion that is more tense than a few years ago. We have a Germany plagued by suspicion.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
