German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in parliament on Monday thereby paving the way for early elections in the European Union’s most populous member and biggest economy on 23 February next year.
Scholz called the snap vote against the background of a stalled economy and had expected to lose it, but calculated triggering an early election was his best chance of reviving his party’s fading political fortunes and its leftist-led coalition government the BBC reports.
Ahead of Monday’s vote, Scholz said it would now be up to voters to “determine the political course of our country”, teeing up what is likely to be a frenetic election campaign.
Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) is trailing heavily in opinion polls as the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Friedrich Merz appears to be on course for a return to government.
Scholz told lawmakers that 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?”
His pitch to voters includes pledges to “modernize” Germany’s strict self-imposed rules on running up debt, to increase the national minimum wage and to reduce value-added tax on food, AFP reports.
The chancellor said Germany is Ukraine’s biggest military supplier in Europe and he wants to keep it that way.
Confidence votes are rare in Germany, a country of 83 million people that prizes stability. This was only the sixth time in its postwar history that a chancellor had called one.
The last was in 2005, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder engineered an early election that was narrowly won by center-right challenger Angela Merkel.
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