Berlin: Germany’s embattled Chancellor Olaf Schulz will face parliament on Monday to start the process of a February 23 election, hoping he can weather the political crisis and win a second term.
Scholes, 66, whose coalition collapsed last month, has called a confidence vote which he is expected to lose, clearing the way for the dissolution of the Bundestag and a return to the ballot box.
69-year-old Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU-CSU opposition alliance, is well ahead in opinion polls.
The political contest comes as Europe’s top economy struggles to revive its troubled export-led industrial sector amid high energy prices and fierce competition from China.
Berlin also faces major geopolitical challenges as it confronts Russia over the war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s return to the White House heightens uncertainty over NATO and trade relations.
Mears, a former corporate lawyer, has long drawn fire on the chancellor’s motley coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the left-leaning Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
The coalition’s spat over financial and economic woes came to a head when Schulz fired his rebel FDP finance minister, Christian Lindner, on November 6, the day Trump was re-elected.
Lindner’s departure from the FDP left Scholes at the head of a minority government that included Greens Vice-Chancellor Robert Häbeck and Foreign Minister Annalina Birbach.
Unable to pass a major bill or a new state budget without opposition support, the government is now limping along with all parties in election mode.
Germany’s political crisis comes as key EU partner France is also in crisis and turmoil, with President Emmanuel Macron on Friday asking centrist Francois Barrow to try to form a new government.
‘Doubtful’
German lawmakers will meet in the lower house at 1:00 p.m. (1200GMT), with Scholz speaking first, followed by a debate and then a vote.
To ensure no-confidence results, the Greens have vowed to abstain, after the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) threatened to derail the process by voting for Scholz.
If Scholz loses the vote, as expected, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier could move to dissolve the legislature and formally announce an election date of February 23.
German politics in the post-war period was long stable, stable and dominated by two main tent parties, the CDU-CSU and the SPD, with the smaller FDP often playing the role of kingmaker.
The Greens emerged in the 1980s, but the political landscape has been further fragmented by the rise of the AfD over the past decade, a shock to a country whose dark World War II history has long Far-right parties were banned.
Formed as a Eurosceptic fringe party, the AfD became a major political force after it protested Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees, and now has the support of around 18 percent of voters.
While other parties have pledged a “firewall” of non-cooperation with the AfD, some have borrowed from its anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric.
After the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, some CDU lawmakers called for the nearly one million Syrian refugees in Germany to return to their country of origin.
Berlin-based political scientist Claire Demesme of Sciences Po Paris said the winter election is all the more heated because it comes at a time when “the German model is in crisis.”
He stated that Germany’s prosperity was “built on cheap energy imported from Russia, security policy outsourced to the US, and exports and subcontracting to China”. AFP.
Demsey said the country is now in the midst of a major restructuring process that is “creating fears within society that are reflected at the political level”.
“We can see a political discourse that is more tense than a few years ago. We have Germany with doubts.”