1 month ago
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Friedrich Merz's bid to become Germany's next chancellor has unexpectedly failed in the first round of parliamentary voting.
Mr Merz, leader of the country's CDU/CSU conservatives, is hoping to become the 10th chancellor since the end of the Second World War.
No candidate has failed to win on the first ballot since then.
Needing a majority of 316 out of 630 votes in a secret ballot, he received 310 - falling short by just six votes.
He had been expected to win comfortably after securing a coalition deal with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD).
The result means at least 18 coalition MPs failed to back him.
Parties will now regroup to discuss next steps. Another vote could be held later on Tuesday, though the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Zeit newspapers said that had been ruled out.
The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party said it was prepared to take part in another vote on Wednesday.
"We will not stand in the way of a second round of voting tomorrow," Tino Chrupalla, the party's co-leader, said on German television.
AfD leader Alice Weidel said on X that Merz's failure to secure a majority showed the "weak foundation" on which his coalition was built, adding that it had been "voted out by the voters".
Bodo Ramelow, vice president of the Bundestag and a member of the Left party, also backed a swift resumption, saying he hoped another parliamentary session would be held on Wednesday.
Mr Merz, 69, can run again, but others can also enter the fray.
The lower house of parliament - the Bundestag - has 14 days to elect a candidate with an absolute majority.
There is no limit to the number of votes that can be held within the two-week period.
If no one emerges as the winner, the German president can appoint the candidate who wins the most votes as chancellor, or dissolve the Bundestag and hold a new national election.
Europe's richest nation is looking unusually unsure
We already knew that Friedrich Merz was struggling to win over the public.
What we didn't realise was that it would be so hard to convince his own coalition that he's the right person to lead Germany.
This is the first time since the war that a presumptive chancellor has failed to win a confirmation vote after coalition negotiations.
Even if he does end up earning the job at a second vote, Merz is already a beleaguered figure.
And his coalition, which was already reliant on a tiny majority, now looks about as robust as a paper hat in a thunderstorm.
Merz's popularity has been battered from both sides - first, in January, when he passed a motion through the Bundestag only after getting the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that Germany's intelligence agency has declared a threat to democracy, but which may now be the most popular party in the country.
Then, in a move that seemed even more infuriating to some of his supporters, he agreed a deal to push through a trillion Euros' worth of new loans - something he had previously ruled out.
The irony of all this is that Merz had promised to usher in a new era of constancy and firm leadership after years when Olaf Scholz, the outgoing chancellor from the SPD party, was criticised for lacking decisiveness or political heft.
But recent polls suggest that public trust in Merz - before he even starts the top job - is low.
Only 21% of respondents, in a poll carried out by Stern last month, considered Merz to be trustworthy.
What's more, the Trump administration has thrown its weight firmly behind the AfD.
Before the election, Elon Musk had an online chat with the party's candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, in which he endorsed her and her policies.
Since then, the AfD has been supported by both Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Their support inevitably both undermines Merz and also chisels away at the stigma of supporting the AfD.
It also creates the bizarre situation that the most powerful political establishment in the world is offering support to a party that has been labelled a threat to democracy by its own nation's security and judicial system.
Merz is no political novice, but this is high stakes stuff. He will, almost certainly, still end up as chancellor, but a difficult job has already become much, much harder.
If he tries to hold up his centrist coalition with the SPD he will be attacked, relentlessly, by the AfD and perhaps by Washington.
If he tries to extend a hand of friendship towards the AfD his coalition will probably collapse.
Europe's richest nation is looking unusually unsure.
Whoever is elected as chancellor will have to decide what to do about the AfD.
Mainstream parties have refused to work with it. A "firewall" against collaborating with strongly right-wing parties has been in place since the end of the war.
During federal elections in late February, the AfD scored its best-ever result while Chancellor Olaf Scholz's SPD dropped to about 16%.
The AfD is the second largest party in the lower house of the Bundestag and was officially designated as extremist last week by Germany's domestic spy agency.
The new chancellor's in-tray will also include the Ukraine War and global tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump.
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