Germany’s Chancellor willing to hold confidence vote this year

Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said he is willing to hold a confidence vote in parliament before Christmas after the ruling three-party coalition collapsed under a week ago.

In an interview on Sunday night with public broadcaster ARD, Scholz said, “I am not glued to my post.”

“Think about what is best and where do the citizens and the parties that are competing with the parties now in government and the parties represented in the Bundestag have their rights? There are many things that need to be considered,” he said.

“And I simply say that I am in favour of this happening because I also want it to happen quickly. I don’t want a new mandate from everyone else, but only from the citizens through a strong vote in favour of the SPD.”

Scholz had originally scheduled the vote for 15 January but in the face of increasing pressure is now considering holding it this year, paving the way for snap elections.

Scholz is widely expected to lose the vote, in which case President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will have 21 days to dissolve the Bundestag and fresh elections must take place within 60 days of parliament’s closure.

But Scholz also denied he had provoked the coalition’s collapse, saying he had done everything he could to keep it together.

“No, I didn’t provoke it…I tried until the very end to get things together. We managed a lot of little things but the real issue didn’t go away. And that’s why we’ve been discussing it all day long. And I think you have to be open and honest with the public about that. This is about wanting something that I certainly can’t justify.”

The so-called ‘Traffic Light Coalition’ – made up of Scholz’s Social Democrats, the liberal FDP and the Greens – collapsed on 6 November after Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner.

“He (Lindner) has broken my trust too many times”, Scholz told the press at the time, adding that there is “no more basis of trust for further cooperation” as the FDP leader is “more concerned with his own clientele and the survival of his own party.”

Lindner is the leader of the Free Democratic Party.

Scholz replaced Lindner as finance minister with current state secretary in the chancellery, Jörg Kukies.

The coalition had been at odds for some time, particularly over economic policy, with serious strains on the budget for 2025 and a disappointing performance by the German economy eliciting increasingly different suggestions on how to face and solve the problems.

Many coalition lawmakers had hoped that, after Donald Trump secured the US presidency for a second time, internal strife would be put aside to focus on the potential geopolitical challenges ahead.

Meanwhile, a German government spokesperson confirmed that Scholz and Trump had held a telephone call on Sunday evening in which they exchanged views on bilateral issues and geopolitical challenges.