The chancellor said the minority government would be made up of his Social Democrats and the Greens until early next year — even as the leader of the biggest opposition bloc in parliament, Friedrich Merz from the center-right Christian Democrats, called for an immediate no-confidence vote and new elections.
Scholz stressed again on Thursday, that he does not want to call a vote of confidence before Jan. 15.
“The citizens will soon have the opportunity to decide anew how to proceed,” the chancellor said, according to the German news agency dpa. “That is their right. I will therefore put the vote of confidence to the Bundestag at the beginning of next year.”
A meeting with Merz and Scholz at the chancellery around noontime Thursday about a possible date for the next election ended after less than an hour with Merz leaving without commenting on the talks.
Later on Thursday, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave fired Finance Minister Lindner and two other Free Democrats officials who had resigned — Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger and Justice Minister Marco Buschmann — their certificates of dismissal.
Transport Minister Volker Wissing, who is also with the Free Democrats, said that after talks with Scholz, he had decided to stay in office and instead leave the party. Scholz asked him to add the justice ministry to his portfolio.
Steinmeier also appointed Jörg Kukies, an economic adviser to Scholz, as finance minister. Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir from the Greens agreed to take on the research ministry.
Scholz had announced late Wednesday that he would seek a vote of confidence on Jan. 15 that he said might lead to an early election, perhaps as soon as March. The vote had otherwise been due next September.
After firing his finance minister, the chancellor had accused Lindner of breaching his trust and publicly calling for a fundamentally different economic policy, including what Scholz said would be tax cuts worth billions for a few top earners while at the same time cutting pensions for all retirees.
“That is not decent,” Scholz said.
The chancellor hopes that his minority government — Scholz’s left-leaning Social Democrats with the remaining coalition partner, the environmentalist Greens — will get the support from Merz’s Christian Democrats in parliament in the coming weeks, to pass important legislation and plugging the billion-euro hole in the 2025 budget.
However, Merz on Thursday vehemently rejected Scholz’s plan to wait to hold a vote of confidence until January.
“The coalition no longer has a majority in the German Bundestag, and we therefore call on the chancellor ... to call a vote of confidence immediately, or at the latest by the beginning of next week,” Merz said.
“We simply cannot afford to have a government without a majority in Germany for several months now, and then campaign for several more months, and then possibly conduct coalition negotiations for several weeks,” Merz added.
Since Scholz’s government doesn’t have a majority in parliament any longer, he would likely lose the vote. In that scenario, Germany’s president could dissolve parliament within 21 days and an early election could then be held as soon as January.
“During these 21 days, we will have enough time to find out whether there are any issues that we may have to decide on together,” Merz said, offering his party’s cooperation with the minority government. “We are, of course, prepared to hold talks ... we are also prepared to take responsibility for our country.”
Achim Wambach from the Leibniz Center for European Economic Research cast doubt that a prolonged period with a minority government would help Germany’s economy get back on track
“Germany’s problems are too big to tolerate political gridlock,” the analyst said.
“The government set out to reconcile the transformation towards climate neutrality with economic growth and social security,” Wambach added. “It has not lived up to this claim. The economy is stagnating and investments are failing to materialize.”
“This daunting task was compounded by geo-economic tensions: wars in Europe and the Middle East as well as economically damaging interventions through tariffs and national subsidy policies,” he added. “ The election of Donald Trump has exacerbated these problems. Europe must do more for its security and will have to reckon with increased tariffs.”
The collapse of the coalition came after weeks of disputes among the coalition partners over ways to boost the country’s ailing economy.
Lindner’s pro-business Free Democrats had rejected tax increases or changes to Germany’s strict self-imposed limits on running up debt. Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens wanted to see major state investment and rejected the Free Democrats’ proposals to cut welfare programs- (Wall of Berlin)
East Germany closed the border in Berlin on Aug. 13, 1961, and expanded the Wall into an increasingly elaborate fortification snaking through the city and around the capitalist enclave of West Berlin.
The Wall plugged the last gap in the border between east and west. East Germany’s leadership had already sealed off the country’s main frontier with West Germany, snaking from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia, in 1952. It stayed that way until the border was opened on Nov. 9, 1989.
The Bornholmer Strasse crossing in Berlin was the first to open that night. Border guards, who hadn’t received orders to let anyone pass, gave way under pressure from a large crowd demanding to be let through after an off-handed announcement of new regulations by Politburo spokesperson Günter Schabowski.
Today, a section of Wall slabs with photos of those events and a series of plaques marking the night’s main developments — including an alert sent by The Associated Press’ German service — stands at the former crossing.
The longest section of Wall remaining in Berlin is the East Side Gallery, where the once-gray concrete slabs are covered with murals that were painted by 118 artists after the opening of the border.
Otherwise, the Wall has largely disappeared now and much of the former “death strip” — between the exterior wall that faced West Berlin and an interior wall that faced east — has been built over.
Among the exceptions is a strip of the former border at the Bernauer Strasse memorial site in downtown Berlin, and there are fragments dotted around elsewhere in the city and on its edges.
In most cases, the main East-West German border outside Berlin consisted of heavily fortified fences rather than walls. There were a few exceptions, however: most famously in the village of Moedlareuth, divided between Bavaria and the eastern region of Thuringia, which earned the nickname “Little Berlin.” Part of Moedlareuth’s border can still be seen today.
