FEB. 23 ELECTIONS: Although the chancellor is to continue in a caretaker role and with a minority in parliament, the political turmoil potentially threatens months of paralysis
AFP, BERLIN
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday lost a confidence vote, spelling the effective end of his troubled government and putting Europe’s biggest economy on the path to elections on Feb. 23.
Scholz had called the vote, expecting to lose it, weeks after his coalition collapsed. Later on Monday, he asked German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dissolve the legislature and ask voters to head back to the ballot box.
Although the center-left chancellor continues in a caretaker role and with a minority in parliament, the political turmoil threatens months of paralysis until a new coalition government is formed.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz bites his finger ahead of a vote of confidence at the Bundestag in Berlin on Monday.
Photo: Reuters
Embattled Scholz, 66, lags badly in the polls behind conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz, who heads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
After more than three years at the helm, Scholz was plunged into crisis when his unruly three-party coalition collapsed on Nov. 6.
The political turbulence has hit Germany as it struggles to revive a stuttering economy hammered by high energy prices and tough competition from China.
Berlin also faces major geopolitical challenges as it confronts Russia over the Ukraine war, and as US president-elect Donald Trump’s looming return heightens uncertainty over NATO and trade ties.
Those threats were at the center of a heated debate between Scholz, Merz and other party leaders ahead of the vote in the lower house, in which 207 lawmakers expressed confidence in Scholz against 394 who did not, with 116 abstentions.
After Scholz outlined his plans for massive spending on security, business and social welfare, Merz demanded to know why he had not taken those steps in the past, asking: “Were you on another planet?”
Scholz said that his government had boosted spending on the armed forces which previous CDU-led governments had left “in a deplorable state.”
“It is high time to invest powerfully and decisively in Germany,” Scholz said, adding about Russia’s war in Ukraine that “a highly armed nuclear power is waging war in Europe just two hours’ flight from here.”
Merz fired back that Scholz had left the nation in “one of the biggest economic crises of the post-war era.”
“You had your chance, but you did not use it… You, Mr Scholz, do not deserve confidence,” Merz said.
Merz, a former corporate lawyer who has never held a government leadership post, lambasted the motley alliance of the chancellor’s Social Democrats, the left-leaning Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Coalition bickering over fiscal and economic woes came to a head when Scholz fired his rebellious FDP finance minister Christian Lindner on Nov. 6.
