Chancellor Olaf Scholz loses vote of confidence

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in parliament, paving the way for early elections on February 23.

Scholz called Monday’s vote and expected to lose it, but calculated that provoking an early election was his best chance to revive his party’s political fortunes.

It comes about two months after the collapse of Scholz’s three-party coalition government, which left the embattled chancellor at the head of a minority administration.

Ahead of Monday’s vote, Scholz said it would now be up to voters to “determine the political course of our country,” setting up what is likely to be a fiercely contested election campaign.

Losing Monday’s no-confidence motion was the result Scholz wanted.

Thanks to the loss, the election can now be held in February, instead of September as originally planned.

207 deputies, mainly from their own party, voted in favor of Scholz, 394 voted against and 116 abstained.

From Scholz’s argumentative tripartite government coalition collapsed in NovemberHe had relied on the support of opposition conservatives to pass new laws, effectively turning his administration into an outgoing government.

Given Germany’s stagnant economy and the global crises facing the West, staggering forward to the planned September 2025 election date risked being seen as irresponsible by the electorate.

Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) is far behind in opinion polls, while the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Friedrich Merz appears to be on track to return to government.

Opening the debate before Monday’s vote, Scholz said early elections were an opportunity to set a new course for the country and called for “massive” investments, particularly in defense, while Merz said higher debt would be a burden. for the younger generations and promised taxes. courteous.

Scholz’s decision to stage a vote he expected to lose to dissolve his own government was described as a “kamikaze” move by the German tabloid Bild, but it is generally the only way a German government can dissolve parliament and trigger early elections.

The process was specifically designed by the founders of modern post-war Germany to avoid the political instability of the Weimar era.

This vote of confidence is not a political crisis in itself: it is a standard constitutional mechanism that has been used by modern German chancellors five times to overcome political deadlock, and that Gerhard Schröder deployed on two occasions.

However, there is a deeper problem within German politics.

At first glance, the collapse of the coalition was caused by a dispute over money. Scholz’s center-left SDP and its Green partners wanted to relax Germany’s strict debt rules to finance support for Ukraine and key infrastructure projects.

This was blocked by Scholz’s own finance minister, Christian Lindner, leader of the liberal, business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), which prioritized reducing debt.

Lindner was fired and the coalition collapsed. After years of unedifying discussions, you could almost hear the sigh of relief in Berlin’s corridors of power, but the underlying cause is harder to resolve and more worrying.

Germany’s political party system has become more fragmented, with more parties than ever in parliament. The new upstart political forces are also more radical.

In 2017, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the Bundestag for the first time, with 12.6%.

In 2021, it fell to 10.4%, but now, according to polls, it is around 20%.

The AfD will not enter the government because no one will work with it to form a coalition. But the extreme right is consuming the part of the vote that goes to the two large centrist parties that have always proposed modern German chancellors.

The higher the proportion of AfD, the more difficult it is for traditional parties to form a stable governing coalition.

That was arguably the underlying problem that separated Scholz’s fragmented coalition: left-leaning Social Democrats and Greens and spenders trying to work with free-market small-state liberals.

Rather than disappearing after the upcoming February election, that problem is likely to get worse. If the far right wins a fifth of the seats in parliament, it could become even more difficult after February to form a stable coalition between like-minded parties.

Another new populist political party could also enter parliament for the first time: the far-left, nativist and anti-immigrant Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, BSW, named after its Marxist leader.

The Conservatives are leading in the polls, but as things stand their options for forming coalition partners are limited.

They refuse to work with the far right and it is difficult to imagine that they would also like to work with the radical left. The free-market Liberals may not even make it to parliament, and some Conservatives refuse to consider the Greens.

That leaves Scholz’s SDP as a possible partner, although Scholz is likely to be ousted from power after his spell in power saw his popularity plummet.

Whoever the next government will be, the era of comfortable consensual coalitions in Germany appears to be over.