German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in the German parliament. It is the outcome Scholz had hoped for when he called for the confidence vote last week, analysts say. His aim: to lose this vote now, win fresh elections and come back stronger next time.
“Politics is not a game,” Scholz told members of the parliament, the Bundestag, ahead of Monday’s vote. As a result of the confidence motion’s defeat, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will dissolve the parliament and call for new elections in late February.
In the Bundestag, 394 members voted no, 207 voted yes and 116 abstained. For the vote of confidence to have been successful, it would have required 367 yes votes.
Scholz’s fractious three-party coalition government collapsed in early November, when the chancellor fired his finance minister in a dispute over how to revitalize Germany’s stagnant economy. “He has broken my trust too often,” Scholz said of Finance Minister Christian Lindner, the head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), one of three parties in the governing coalition Scholz led 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.
Losing to win
In Germany, a motion for a vote of confidence is a rarely used, double-edged constitutional tool that chancellors reach for to manage politically challenging times. (Many other countries refer to this constitutional tool as a no-confidence vote.) Unlike in certain countries with roots in the British parliamentary system, the goal sometimes can be not to win but to lose such a vote.
While a successful vote can strengthen and even repair fractures within a coalition, a lost vote automatically triggers new elections that can — if the gamble pays off — hand the chancellor’s party a win in parliamentary elections that provides new energy and legitimacy for a government’s agenda.
Now that Scholz has lost Monday’s confidence vote, he hopes to win the February elections and form a new coalition under his renewed leadership.
What led to Monday’s vote?
Scholz has long carried the nickname Scholzomat, because of his perceived robotic presence, one devoid, critics say, of charisma and emotion.
But he will need more than a newly combative and decisive persona to hold onto power, 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 2005-2021, at the head of different coalitions led by her center-right Christian Democratic Union.
Scholz’s traffic-light coalition took over the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and just a couple of months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After strong initial approval ratings, Scholz and his government slowly lost the public’s goodwill as one crisis after another unfolded, including economic woes due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the renewed conflict in the Middle East and growing concerns over migration.
These challenges and different political philosophies started fracturing the coalition. Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party and Finance Minister Lindner with the FDP started to publicly challenge Scholz’s authority. The rift within the coalition then reached its crescendo last month, when Scholz asked the German president to dismiss Lindner.
The disagreements and infighting alarmed many in the public, as the country faced multiple political, economic and foreign policy challenges. As the coalition crumbled, all other FDP-affiliated ministers withdrew, leaving Scholz in charge 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.
Mixed results from confidence votes in the past
After World War II and the end of Nazi Germany, the new federal republic was formed in 1949. Over the course of 75 years, four chancellors have used a motion for a vote of confidence to try to secure their hold on leadership. Scholz’s was the sixth time.
The results have been mixed.
The first chancellor to call for such a vote was Willy Brandt in 1972. His politics of reconciliation with socialist and communist countries in Eastern Europe, known as Ostpolitik, caused a rift among his SPD-led coalition. As Brandt planned, he lost the vote — but scored a decisive win in the following snap elections and strengthened his mandate to govern.
Ten years later, another SPD chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, also called for a vote of confidence. He won that vote. Even so, Schimdt was ousted a short time later.
That opened the door for CDU politician Helmut Kohl, who took over as chancellor. But without having won an election, Kohl knew he needed the public’s support to govern effectively. So he too called for a vote of confidence — the second one of that year, 1982.
He lost. But thanks to his party’s good showing in the election that followed, Kohl was able to stay 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 asked for a vote of confidence after his social reform programs led to his SPD party losing in a state election. He lost the confidence vote, an outcome he intended as he wanted to go back to the voters in the hopes of buttressing his support.
But things did not go to plan: He lost the subsequent snap elections, a result which marked the beginning of the Merkel era.
What are Scholz’s chances?
Now Scholz is giving voters a chance to create a new carve-up of seats in parliament to allow the formation of a new coalition government — one holding an outright majority and thus better able to govern.
Scholz’s chances of winning the snap election are slim, analysts say, but not impossible. There’s no clear frontrunner going into February’s election at this point although CDU party leader Friedrich Merz, a conservative former businessman, is currently leading in most polls, which show his Christian Democratic Union party with a firm lead going into a winter election season. Ahead of the confidence vote, 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.