German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in the German Parliament. Those are the final results Scholz expected when he called for a vote of confidence last week, analysts say. Their goal: lose this vote now, win some other election, and come back stronger next time.
“Politics is a game,” Scholz told members of parliament, the Bundestag, before Monday’s vote. Following the failure of the confidence motion, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will dissolve Parliament and call new elections at the end of February.
In the Bundestag, 394 members voted no, 207 voted yes and 116 abstained. For the vote of confidence to have been successful, it would have required 367 yes votes.
Scholz’s three-party coalition government collapsed in early November, when the chancellor fired his finance minister in a dispute over how to revitalize Germany’s stagnating economy. “He has betrayed my belief too often,” Scholz said of Finance Minister Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), one of the three parties in the government coalition led by Scholz since December 2021.
This left the other two coalition partners with a majority in parliament.
Lindner also spoke before Monday’s vote, attributing the coalition’s collapse to its lack of answers to revive the country’s faltering economy, which alienated voters.
In Germany, a motion for a vote of confidence is a rarely used, double-edged constitutional tool that chancellors reach for to manage politically challenging times. (Many other countries refer to this constitutional tool as a no-confidence vote.) Unlike in certain countries with roots in the British parliamentary system, the goal sometimes can be not to win but to lose such a vote.
While a successful vote can, or even heal, fractures within a coalition, a lost vote automatically triggers new elections which, if successful, can give the chancellor’s party a victory in parliamentary elections, thus providing new power and new legitimacy. to the government program. .
Now that Scholz lost Monday’s vote of confidence, he hopes to win the February election and form a new coalition with his renewed leadership.
Scholz has long been nicknamed Scholzomat, due to his perceived robot presence, devoid of an air of mystery and excitement, critics say.
But he will need more than just a combative and decisive new personality to stay in power, analysts say.
Germany’s governing coalition under Scholz’s leadership was formed after his Social Democratic Party (SPD) came in first — but without an outright majority — in the September 2021 federal parliamentary elections. It took 59 days of negotiations to form an unprecedented three-party coalition with Lindner’s FDP and the Green Party. The coalition became known as the Ampelkoalition, or traffic light coalition, because of the colors associated with these parties: red, yellow and green.
Scholz’s election victory in 2021 ended a 16-year drought for the SPD. He succeeded Angela Merkel, who governed as chancellor from 2005 to 2021, leading other coalitions led through her center-right Christian Democratic Union.
Scholz’s traffic-light coalition took over the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and just a couple of months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After strong initial approval ratings, Scholz and his government slowly lost the public’s goodwill as one crisis after another unfolded, including economic woes due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the renewed conflict in the Middle East and growing concerns over migration.
These demanding situations and other political philosophies began to divide the coalition. Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party and Finance Minister Lindner of the FDP began to publicly challenge Scholz’s authority. The department within the coalition reached its climax last month, when Scholz called on the German president to fire Lindner.
The disagreements and infighting alarmed many in the public, as the country faced political, economic and foreign policy challenges. When the coalition collapsed, all other FDP-affiliated ministers withdrew, leaving Scholz at the head of a minority government.
The last three years under Ampelkoalition have ruined Scholz’s reputation. His approval ratings are dismal and his cautious taste for government has not endeared him to the public. However, its coalition partners are equally unpopular, according to a recent poll conducted through the German Wahlen Studies Institute for public broadcaster ZDF.
After World War II and the end of Nazi Germany, the new federal republic was formed in 1949. Over the course of 75 years, four chancellors have used a motion for a vote of confidence to try to secure their hold on leadership. Scholz’s was the sixth time.
The effects have been mixed.
The first chancellor to call for such a vote was Willy Brandt in 1972. His politics of reconciliation with socialist and communist countries in Eastern Europe, known as Ostpolitik, caused a rift among his SPD-led coalition. As Brandt planned, he lost the vote — but scored a decisive win in the following snap elections and strengthened his mandate to govern.
Ten years later, another SPD chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, also called for a vote of confidence. He won that vote. Despite everything, Schimdt was overthrown shortly afterwards.
This opened the door for CDU politician Helmut Kohl to take over as chancellor. But without winning the election, Kohl knew he needed an audience to govern effectively. That’s why he also asked for a vote of confidence: the moment of that year, 1982.
He lost. But thanks to his party’s clever performance in the upcoming elections, Kohl will be able to remain in power for a total of 16 years.
Ahead of Monday’s vote, the most recent confidence-building moves were put forward by Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder in 2001 and 2005. In 2001, he linked his confidence movement to a separate vote to authorize the German army’s operation in Afghanistan following the al-Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. in the United States. Either vote won.
Four years later, he again called for a vote of confidence after his systems of social reform led to the defeat of his SPD party in national elections. He lost the vote of confidence, an end result he sought because he wanted to return to the electorate in hopes of gaining support for construction.
But things went as planned: she lost the snap election that followed, a result that marked the beginning of the Merkel era.
Scholz is now giving the electorate the chance to create a new distribution of seats in parliament to allow the formation of a new coalition government, one that has an absolute majority and is better able to govern.
Scholz’s chances of winning the snap election are slim, analysts say, but not impossible. There is no clear front-runner for the February election at this time; CDU party leader Friedrich Merz, a conservative former businessman, has been leading the polls lately, giving his Christian Democratic Union party a solid lead as the winter election approaches. Before the confidence vote, Merz called Monday a “day of relief. “
A potentially unintended consequence of the move toward snap elections is that a right-wing party like the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, could win over voters who are disillusioned with Germany’s current political dysfunction.
Even though Germany’s established parties have said that they would not enter a coalition with the AfD, if voters want change, analysts say they could be forced to consider such a scenario.