Scholz Loses in Parliament, Setting Up an Election

Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the German parliament on Monday, putting the European Union's most populous member and biggest economy on course to hold an early election in February. Scholz won the support of 207 lawmakers in the 733-seat lower house, or Bundestag, while 394 voted against him and 116 abstained. That left him far short of the majority of 367 needed to win, the AP reports. Scholz leads a minority government after his unpopular and notoriously rancorous three-party coalition collapsed on Nov. 6 when he fired his finance minister in a dispute over how to revitalize the nation's stagnant economy.

Leaders of several major parties then agreed that a parliamentary election should be held on Feb. 23, seven months earlier than originally planned. The confidence vote was needed because post-World War II Germany's constitution doesn't allow the Bundestag to dissolve itself. Now President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has to decide whether to dissolve parliament and call an election. Steinmeier has 21 days to make that decision. Once parliament is dissolved, the election must be held within 60 days. In practice, the campaign is already well underway, and Monday's three-hour debate reflected that. Arguments made Monday to lawmakers by the center-left Scholz and the center-right challenger Friedrich Merz included:

• Scholz: The election will determine whether "we, as a strong country, dare to invest strongly in our future; do we have confidence in ourselves and our country, or do we put our future on the line? Do we risk our cohesion and our prosperity by delaying long-overdue investments?" He pledges to "modernize" Germany's self-imposed rules on running up debt, to increase the national minimum wage, and to reduce value-added tax on food.
• Merz: "You're leaving the country in one of its biggest economic crises in postwar history," he told Scholz. "You're standing here and saying, business as usual, let's run up debt at the expense of the younger generation, let's spend money and ... the word 'competitiveness' of the German economy didn't come up once in the speech you gave today."

Polling shows Scholz's party well behind Merz's Union bloc. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck of the environmentalist Greens, the remaining partner in Scholz's government, is also bidding for the top job—though his party is further back. The far-right Alternative for Germany, which is polling strongly, has nominated Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor but has no chance of taking the job because other parties refuse to work with it. Germany's electoral system traditionally produces coalitions, per the AP, and polls show no party anywhere near an absolute majority on its own.

(More Germany stories.)