German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in the German parliament. This is the outcome Scholz was hoping for when he called for a vote of confidence last week, analysts say. Their goal: to lose that vote now, win new elections and come back more powerful 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 deputies voted against, 207 voted and 116 abstained. For the vote of confidence to be successful, 367 votes would have been needed.
Scholz’s three-party coalition government collapsed in early November, when the chancellor fired his finance minister amid a dispute over how to revitalize Germany’s stagnant economy. “He has too often betrayed my belief as true,” Scholz said of Finance Minister Christian Lindner. Leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), one of the three parties in the ruling coalition led by Scholz since December 2021.
That left the remaining two coalition partners without a majority in parliament.
Lindner also spoke ahead of Monday’s vote, and blamed the coalition’s downfall on its inability to come up with solutions to boost the country’s faltering economy, which in turn alienated voters.
In Germany, a vote of confidence is a rarely used double-edged constitutional tool that chancellors use to manage politically difficult times (many other countries refer to this constitutional tool as a vote of no confidence). Unlike some countries that are rooted in the British parliamentary system, the goal may be not to win and to lose such a vote.
While a successful vote can, or even fix, fractures within a coalition, a lost vote automatically triggers new elections that, if successful, can give the chancellor’s party a victory in parliamentary elections, thus providing new power and new legitimacy to the government’s 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 carried the nickname Scholzomat, because of his perceived robotic presence, one devoid, critics say, of charisma and emotion.
But to retain power he will need more than just a new, combative and determined personality, 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 2021 election victory ended a 16-year drought for the SPD. He succeeded Angela Merkel, who governed as chancellor from 2005 to 2021, leading coalitions led through her center-right Christian Democratic Union.
Scholz’s traffic-friendly coalition took control of the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and just months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After strong initial approval ratings, Scholz and his government slowly lost public goodwill as crisis after crisis added to economic woes due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, renewed fighting in the Middle East, and the development of migration considerations.
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 have begun to publicly challenge Scholz’s authority. The department within the coalition reached its crescendo last year. month, when Scholz asked 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 past three years under the Ampelkoalition have hurt Scholz’s reputation. His approval ratings are dismal and his often-cautious governing style has not endeared him to the public. However, his coalition partners are similarly unpopular, according to a recent survey conducted by German research institution Wahlen for public broadcaster ZDF.
After World War II and the end of Nazi Germany, the new federal republic was established in 1949. Over 75 years, four chancellors used a vote of confidence movement to try to secure their leadership. Array Scholz was the sixth time.
The effects have been mixed.
The first chancellor to call for such a vote was Willy Brandt in 1972. His policy of reconciliation with the socialist and communist countries of Eastern Europe, known as Ostpolitik, caused a split within his coalition-led coalition. through the SPD. As Brandt predicted, he lost the vote, but won a decisive victory in the next snap election and strengthened his governing mandate.
Ten years later, another SPD chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, also called for a vote of confidence, which he won. However, 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 strong presence in the resulting elections, Kohl was able to remain in power for a total of 16 years.
Prior to Monday’s vote, the most recent motions for votes of confidence were issued by Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder in 2001 and 2005. In 2001, he connected his motion for a vote of confidence with a separate vote to authorize Germany’s military operation in Afghanistan following the al-Qaida attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States. He won both votes.
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 did not go to plan: He lost the subsequent snap elections, a result which 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 early election are slim, analysts say, but not impossible. There is no clear favorite for the February election at this time; CDU party leader Friedrich Merz, a conservative former businessman, is leading in the polls lately, giving his Christian Democratic Union party a solid lead as the winter elections approach. Before the vote of confidence, 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.