Germany’s Scholz loses confidence vote, triggering path to snap elections

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00:00German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a historic no-confidence vote this Monday,

00:05paving the way for the nation to hold an early poll in February.

00:10Scholz's three-party coalition collapsing last month, when the Chancellor fired his

00:14finance minister, prompting the neoliberal Free Democrats to quit.

00:18It came after months of infighting over fiscal priorities and ideological differences that

00:24caused deep divisions within the country's first-ever three-way federal coalition.

00:28Joining me now from Berlin is Nick Holdsworth.

00:31Nick, so it seems Olaf Scholz has now got what he wanted.

00:38Absolutely. It's a historic night here in Berlin. It's only the fifth such vote of

00:45no-confidence in the last 50 years and it will result in only the fourth early election as a

00:51result of those no-confidence votes. There was quite a fierce debate for three hours before

00:57this vote, with the opposition taking their opportunity to tear in to Olaf Scholz, to accuse

01:03him of not having done anything over the last three years, of having weakened Germany's economy

01:09and not really done anything to shore up its national security. The Chancellor, in his turn,

01:15criticised the head of the leading opposition part of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, saying that

01:22under his governance nothing would get better and that their party in the past, the CDU,

01:29under Merkel, Olaf Scholz's predecessor, had left the German army in a state of disarray,

01:35underfunded disarray. So there was a lot of back and forth. There were also speeches by the

01:41heads of the far-right wing party, AfD, alternative for Deutschland. A lot of other members of the

01:48Bundestag walked out when the head of the AfD made her speech. So what happens next, Nick?

01:58What happens next is that the parliament will be formally dissolved. Olaf Scholz will request

02:04the German president to formally dissolve the parliament and then there'll be new elections

02:09on February the 23rd and electioneering will officially begin as soon as parliament is

02:16dissolved, although it's already begun in a way in the last week or so. There have been

02:19quite a lot of parties taking positions. For example, the CDU have the odds on favourites to

02:26win the election in terms of forming a governing coalition because in Germany you very rarely get

02:32a majority. They've been demanding that Syrian refugees be sent back to Syria because apparently

02:38it's safe there now. Now that is something which also the far-right wing AfD have been calling for

02:44and the AfD are wondering how on earth if Friedrich Merz becomes the next chancellor,

02:50he could even enact such a policy without their support, but he's really not going to take

02:56them into a coalition. So we're going to see a lot of political argy-bargy in the next few months

03:04and expect a lot of quite extreme statements from the far-right and the far-left pushing

03:11those in the more centre to perhaps change their language in order to attract votes.

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