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BERLIN — Few other countries can choreograph a government collapse that’s as painstakingly slow and deliberate as Germany is doing right now.
Monday’s vote of confidence in Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the German parliament, which he’ll almost certainly lose, is just the latest step in a process that started in early November and culminates in a snap election on Feb. 23.
And even though the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is bound to try to throw a spanner in the works in the coming week, what happens next is largely predictable.
The constitution, designed to prevent the kind of tumult experienced during the Weimar Republic — which helped enable the rise of the Nazis — contains a series of provisions intended to make the unravelling of a government as stable and orderly as possible.
Here’s our guide to what to expect.
What is the next step?
When Scholz faces the German Bundestag on Monday, the majority of the country’s 733 lawmakers are expected to withdraw their confidence in the center-left politician.
Losing the vote is a procedural and necessary step to pave the way for early elections, after Scholz’s fractious three-party coalition fell last month.
During Monday’s session, Scholz is set to make a 25-minute statement first, in which he is expected to outline his reasons for calling a vote of confidence. His speech will be followed by a parliamentary debate lasting around two hours, after which lawmakers will head to the booths to either withdraw or confirm their confidence in the chancellor.
Is the outcome predetermined?
Although nothing is impossible, Scholz is very likely to lose the vote — which is also what he is hoping for.
The only party that might do something unpredictable is the AfD, which is known for its unexpected, tactical moves in previous votes. Some of its lawmakers have already said they are planning to support Scholz because they fear the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz from the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), could plunge Germany into war by being a stronger backer of Ukraine against Russia than Scholz has been.
“I do not want to see Mr. Merz in a position of responsibility under any circumstances,” Jürgen Pohl, the first AfD lawmaker to announce he would vote for Scholz, told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook. Only a minority of the AfD’s 76 lawmakers are, however, expected to follow suit.
The AfD is currently polling in second place, which would likely make it the biggest opposition force after the election — so it has an interest in dissolving parliament.
In any case, the parliamentary group leaders of the Greens look set to neutralize possible far-right surprises by calling on their lawmakers to abstain in the vote.
That means that even if all AfD lawmakers and Scholz’s own parliamentary group support the chancellor, a majority would still be a long way off.
What happens next?
If Scholz loses the vote, he will on Monday afternoon propose to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dissolve the Bundestag, the chancellor told reporters on Wednesday. “If the president follows my proposal, the voters will be able to elect a new Bundestag on February 23. That is my goal,” he said.
Scholz and his minority government, which includes his own center-left Social Democratic Party and the Greens, will in the meantime remain in power in its full capacity.
But as Scholz does not have a majority in parliament — which is necessary to pass laws — and is expected to be voted out of office soon, he is considered a lame duck, at home and abroad.
How did we get here?
In early November, just hours after it became clear that Donald Trump had won the United States presidential election, Scholz appeared before cameras to announce that his battered tripartite alliance was collapsing in rather dramatic fashion over spending issues.
Scholz’s coalition — consisting of his SPD and the Greens on the left side of the political spectrum, and the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party on the center right — was never a match made in heaven. Both the SPD and the Greens favor a strong social safety net and big investment to speed economic growth and the green energy transition. The FDP, on the other hand, believes in less government and curtailed spending. We wrote up the full analysis here.
What will Germany’s next government look like?
Merz’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, are currently leading in the polls by a wide margin, on 32 percent support. That is double what Scholz’s SPD, which is just behind the AfD in third place, is expected to receive.
With the conservatives set to win the anticipated February election, the big question is who will become their junior coalition partner and if that party (most likely the SPD or the Greens) will be strong enough to make a two-party coalition possible. Due to the rise of the AfD and the creation of the new populist-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), three-party coalitions — which are uncommon in postwar Germany and tend to be more volatile — might become the new normal.
The Greens have recently been cozying up to Merz’s CDU by underlining their similar foreign policy stances. Both parties tend to be more favorable to backing Ukraine in its war with Russia than Scholz, who has been campaigning on what he calls a “prudent” approach.
But while Merz is not ruling out a coalition with the Greens, Bavarian CSU leader Markus Söder — who has made bashing the Greens one of his personal trademarks — said in a podcast this week that he would veto such an alliance.
The FDP is meanwhile struggling to even make it into the next Bundestag. The party, which has descended into crisis over revelations that it methodically planned to blow up Scholz’s coalition, is polling below the 5 percent threshold necessary to gain seats in parliament.
