(Bloomberg) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he’s open to moving up a parliamentary confidence vote by several weeks to before Christmas, potentially speeding up the country’s early election to February.
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Scholz, whose three-party government collapsed last week, said the shift in timing would depend on an agreement between parliamentary leaders of his Social Democratic Party and the two parties backing Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat who’s seeking the chancellorship in a bid to move Germany toward more conservative policies.
“To ask for a confidence vote before Christmas — if everyone jointly takes that view, that’s absolutely no problem for me,” Scholz said during an interview with public broadcaster ARD late Sunday.
Europe’s largest economy has been plunged into political uncertainty after Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the Free Democratic Party, breaking up the governing coalition in a dispute over debt-financed government spending to boost military support for Ukraine.
While polls suggest Merz is the election frontrunner, Scholz on Sunday expressed confidence that he can win, saying he previously defied bad poll numbers before winning the chancellorship in 2021. He also said he expects his party to back him to run for another term.
Scholz has previously said he’ll seek a confidence vote in mid-January that he’d be expected to lose, a required step before Germany’s president can call an early election.
That followed his proposal to move up Germany’s next federal election by six months to the end of March or earlier. He plans to run a minority government with the Greens until then.
Scholz’s government broke down on the same day that Donald Trump was declared the winner of the US presidential election.
Trump has questioned further military support for Ukraine and has been hostile to Germany in the past. He’ll be returning to the White House as Germany’s economy struggles and key industries such as autos and chemicals face disruptive transformations.
Merz has said he’d seek to make deals with Trump to boost Germany’s standing. In an interview with Stern magazine, Merz called Scholz a “lame duck” and doubled down on his demand to accelerate the timetable for an early federal election.
German officials have cautioned that holding elections as early as January may result in logistical problems and open the door to legal challenges, prompting the head of Germany’s paper industry association to assure the nation that enough ballot paper would be available.