Merz fails to be elected Germany’s chancellor in first parliament vote

Germany’s conservative leader falls short by six votes in the first round of voting that he was widely expected to win.

Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has failed in his bid to become the country’s 10th chancellor, falling short by just six votes in the first round of voting in the Bundestag.

Merz, who had been widely expected to win the parliamentary vote, needed 316 votes to secure in the secret ballot held on Tuesday, but he received only 310 votes.

The failure to win the required majority means that the political parties will now regroup to discuss the next steps.

It is an embarrassment for Merz as no candidate for German chancellor ever failed to secure an absolute majority in the first round of voting.

The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, has 14 days to elect a chancellor, either Merz or another candidate, who will need an outright majority.

National vote

Merz’s CDU/CSU conservatives had topped the polls in the national elections in February with 28.5 percent of the vote, but they still require at least one coalition partner to form a majority government.

On Monday, the CDU/CSU reached an agreement with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), who secured just 16.4 percent in the elections after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government last year.

If the vote were to pass, the two parties would have a slim majority, with just 328 seats in the Bundestag out of a total of 630.

Reporting from Berlin, Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane said that within the CDU/CSU and SPD blocs, 10 members failed to attend the vote, three abstained, and several voted against Merz “despite the official steer” of their parties.

It comes as the newly-formed coalition had set ambitious goals, including stimulating economic growth, boosting defence spending, and tightening immigration policies in response to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second in the vote.

‘Serious crisis’

Uli Brueckner, a professor of political science at Stanford University, based in Berlin, told Al Jazeera that the AFD will be “celebrating” the outcome of the vote.

“We see a lot of interference with fake news and manipulation from enemies of western democracy and surprisingly, also, from the United States of America – in which the current administration currently support the AFD,” he said.

Brueckner suggested that the US, Russia, and autocratic regimes, may want to see instability in Germany.

“This is not just a hiccup in which a pluralist society expresses different opinions about the coalition agreement, but this a serious crisis of legitimacy,” he said.

The CDU and SPD have governed Germany together in the past, most recently in three of the four terms of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led the country from 2005 to 2021.