Berlin (TDI): Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote on Monday after weeks of turmoil, setting 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 fresh polls.
The critical vote came after a heated debate in which political rival s exchanged bitter accusations, hinting at the upcoming election campaign.
Embattled Scholz, 66, is trailing badly in the polls behind conservative leader Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel.
After more than three years in power, Scholz was plunged into crisis when his unstable three-party coalition collapsed on November 6, the same day Donald Trump re-elected to the White House.
The political turmoil has hit Germany as it struggles to revive a stuttering economy hammered by high energy prices and hard competition from China.
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Berlin also faces significant geopolitical challenges as it confronts Russia over the Ukraine war and as Trump’s looming return increases uncertainty over future NATO and trade relations.
Those threats were the focal point of a harsh debate between Scholz, Merz and other leaders of the party ahead of the vote in the lower house, where 207 members of Parliament supported Scholz, 394 did not, and 116 abstained.
After Scholz highlighted his plans for massive spending on security, social welfare ad business, Merz demanded to know why he had not taken those measures in the past, asking: “Were you on another planet?”, according to AFP.
Scholz argued that his administration had boosted spending on the armed forces which previous CDU-led governments had left “in a deplorable state”.
Scholz said, “It is high time to invest in Germany,” warning that “a highly armed nuclear power Russia is waging war in Europe just two hours away.”
But Merz fired back that Scholz had left Germany in “one of the biggest economic crises of the postwar era”.
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“You had your chance, but you did not use it … You, Mr. Scholz, do not deserve confidence”, charged Merz.
Merz, a former corporate lawyer with no government leadership experience, criticized the varied coalition of the chancellor’s Social Democrats, the left-leaning Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Coalition wrangling over fiscal and economic problems came to a head when the chancellor fired FDP finance minister Christian Lindner on November 6.
