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Chancellor Olaf Scholz has rejected calls for snap elections after a European poll that saw all three parties in his coalition register grave losses and his Social Democrats suffer their worst-ever result in a nationwide vote.
The dire performance of Scholz’s coalition in Sunday’s EU vote has prompted opposition calls for the chancellor to follow Emmanuel Macron’s lead and call an early national election.
“The next election is scheduled for autumn next year and we plan to hold it then as planned,” said Steffen Hebestreit, Scholz’s spokesman. “The idea never came up, at any point, ever, to bring forward the elections.”
Scholz’s centre-left SPD scored just 14 per cent, the Greens 12 per cent — eight points down on the last European election in 2019 — and the liberal FDP 5 per cent.
The clear winner were the centre-right Christian Democrats — the CDU/CSU — with 30 per cent, but the far-right Alternative for Germany also performed strongly, coming second with 16 per cent, their best-ever result in a nationwide vote.
Scholz’s government has become associated by voters with the surge in energy prices seen after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the weakness in an economy plagued by inflation, high interest rates and a decline in global trade.
The coalition has also been faulted for failing to get a grip on illegal immigration, frequent public squabbles and unpopular climate policies — in particular a botched attempt to replace oil and gas-fired boilers with more environmentally-friendly heat pumps.
But the result was also a painful defeat for Scholz personally. He expended huge political capital on the SPD campaign, appearing on all election posters alongside the party’s lead candidate, Katarina Barley.
Markus Söder, the powerful conservative prime minister of the southern state of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, said on Monday that the result amounted to a “vote of no confidence” in Scholz.
He said the chancellor should emulate Macron, or Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who engineered early elections in 2005 after his SPD suffered a big defeat in a regional poll in the important state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
“The logical consequence is: a confidence vote, resignation and early elections,” Söder said on the platform X. “The coalition’s inability to act is a major burden on the whole of Europe.”
However, the CDU chief and opposition leader Friedrich Merz was more cautious. He also drew a parallel between Sunday’s election result and the SPD defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2005, saying he didn’t exclude a similar scenario this year. But he added that it was ultimately up to Scholz.
Analysts have stressed it is much harder to call snap elections in Germany than in France. The chancellor must first call and lose a confidence vote in the Bundestag, after which he can ask the president to dissolve parliament.
“None of the parties has an interest in early elections at the moment,” said Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin. Judging by the results from Sunday night, all three of them might expect to see a steep drop in support, he added.
That was clear in the way the Green and FDP leaders responded to reporters’ questions on Monday about the possibility of a confidence vote.
“We have a joint programme of government . . . and as long as all of us commit to [it] there’s no reason to call that trust into question,” said Christian Lindner, FDP leader and finance minister.
The Scholz government “is a project that is scheduled to last four years, and at the end of these four years there will be a reckoning”, said Hebestreit. “Then the voters will have their say.”
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