Germany’s president dissolves parliament ahead of snap election
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Formal step taken by Frank-Walter Steinmeier after chancellor Olaf Scholz lost confidence vote in Bundestag. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has dissolved parliament and called a snap election on 23 February after Olaf Scholz’s fractious three-way coalition collapsed three years into its mandate.
The national vote will come seven months ahead of schedule amid a rocky stretch of unusual political turmoil for the EU’s top economic power, with growth rates flatlining, industry in crisis and the far right on the rise. Steinmeier, as head of state, made the formal step to dissolve the Bundestag after Scholz, the chancellor, deliberately lost a confidence vote in parliament on 16 December in order to trigger a general election. The president said that in “difficult times” Germany needed a “government that is capable of taking action”, after months of bitter squabbling within Scholz’s centre-left-led coalition.
Although Scholz, a Social Democrat, is standing for a second term, polls indicate that the centre-right opposition leader, Friedrich Merz, will lead his Christian Union (CDU/CSU) bloc to victory in eight weeks’ time, returning it to power for the first time since Angela Merkel left office in 2021.
One week after a deadly Christmas market attack in Magdeburg by a Saudi-born doctor who repeatedly railed online against Muslims and the German state, Steinmeier – whose office is largely ceremonial – warned in a short speech at the Bellevue Palace in central Berlin, the president’s official residence, against allowing “hatred and violence” to erode German society.