(Dec 11): German Chancellor Olaf Scholz filed a petition with the lower house of parliament requesting a confidence vote next Monday that will trigger a snap election in late February.
Scholz surrendered his Bundestag majority last month when he sacked Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats due to a budget dispute, pulling the plug on his three-party governing coalition.
The Social Democrat, who has run Europe’s biggest economy since late 2021, is exploiting a quirk of the constitution to force a national ballot on Feb 23, seven months earlier than the scheduled end of his term. It’s only the sixth time since World War II the confidence-vote mechanism will be invoked.
Scholz signed the petition on Wednesday morning in the chancellery in Berlin and it was delivered to the Bundestag president, his chief spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, said in an emailed statement.
Scholz, whose SPD party is trailing in third in the polls, has been ruling in a minority administration with the Greens since he fired Lindner.
Once he loses Monday’s confidence vote, he can ask President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dissolve the Bundestag and set the election date. Steinmeier, a former Social Democrat vice chancellor, has indicated that he’ll go along with Scholz’s timetable.
Whoever wins the election will face a host of challenges, including Russia’s almost three-year war on Ukraine, turmoil in the Middle East and the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
The next chancellor will also need to secure the funds to pay for Germany’s transformation into a more technologically advanced and climate-friendly economy — and for a military capable of defending the nation.
Scholz used an interview on Tuesday with public broadcaster ARD to propose a reduction of sales tax on basic groceries to 5% from 7% to help lower-income households cope with persistently high inflation.
“This would help many people who earn very little money and would not be an excessive burden on the federal budget,” Scholz said. He expressed confidence that his SPD party can come from behind to win the election despite a big lead in the polls for the opposition conservatives.
With just over two months to go, the CDU/CSU alliance under Friedrich Merz leads at around 31%, the far-right Alternative for Germany is second with about 18% and the SPD third at 17%, according to the latest Bloomberg polling average.
The Greens are fourth with 13% and the BSW — a new far-left party founded in January — fifth at 5%. Lindner’s FDP remains in danger of missing the 5% threshold for getting into parliament with 4%.
The conservatives have ruled out cooperating with the AfD, meaning their only path to a Bundestag majority will likely be to team up with either the SPD or the Greens, or both.
The Greens have named Robert Habeck, the current economy minister and vice chancellor, as their lead candidate for the election, while the AfD picked co-leader Alice Weidel.
A Forsa poll for broadcaster ntv published on Tuesday showed that if Germans could vote directly for chancellor, Merz was in first place with 26% but had lost eight percentage points compared with November. Habeck scored 25%, up four points, and Scholz gained five points to 18%.
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