Members of the Bundestag debate before passing a resolution on November 30, 2022 in Berlin, Germany.
Sean Gallup Getty Images News | Getty Images
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday dissolved Germany’s lower house of parliament to pave the way for snap elections on February 23, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government.
“Especially in difficult times like these, stability requires an active government and a reliable parliamentary majority,” Steinmeier said in Berlin, which is why early elections were the right path for Germany. said.
Steinmeier added in his speech that after the election, problem-solving must once again be at the center of politics.
The president, whose post was largely ceremonial after the war, also called for election campaigns to be conducted fairly and transparently.
“External influence, whether it be covert, as was evident in the recent Romanian elections, or overt, as is currently happening particularly intensively on (social media) platform X,” he said. “Anything as blatant as this is dangerous to democracy.”
Scholz, a member of the Social Democratic Party who will lead the caretaker government until a new government is formed, was appointed earlier this month after the resignation of Finance Minister Christian Lindner, leaving the unwieldy coalition government without a parliamentary majority. It was rejected by a vote of confidence in parliament.
The vote will bring conservative challenger Friedrich Merz, who polls suggest is the likely successor to Scholz, to claim that the current government is stifling growth by imposing excessive regulations. And election campaigning has begun in earnest.
Most polls show the Conservative Party leading the Social Democratic Party (SPD) by more than 10 points. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is slightly ahead of the SPD, with its coalition partner the Greens in fourth place.
Mainstream political parties reject the AfD’s rule, but its presence complicates parliamentary calculations and raises the possibility of an unstable coalition.
