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The conservative leader of Germany has unexpectedly not reached the number needed to create a majority in parliament to become Chancellor.
Friedrich Merz needed 316 votes in the 630-seater Bundestag, but only 310, with a significant blow to the Christian Democrats leader, two and a half months after winning the federal elections in Germany.
His coalition with the central left has enough places in parliament, but it seems 18 MPs expected to support him. The failure of Mertz at the first vote is regarded as unprecedented in modern German history.
Bundestag will now have another 14 days to choose either Merz or another candidate as a chancellor.
According to the German Constitution, there is no limit to how many votes can be held, but in the end, if an absolute majority is not reached, then a candidate can be elected without one.
Merz’s defeat is regarded by political commentators as humiliation, probably inflicted by SPD members of the Social Democrat, who signed a coalition deal with his conservatives on Monday.
Not everyone in SPD is satisfied with the deal, but the historical character of Merz’s failure will be difficult for him to continue. No candidate has failed this way since 1949.
The disturbance of the vote on Tuesday undermines Mertz’s hopes to be an antidote against the weakness and division of the last government, which collapsed at the end of last year.
Card party alternatives to Germany, which ranks second in the February election with 20.8% of the votes seized in his failure. Joint leader Alice Widel wrote to X that the vote showed the “weak base that the small coalition was built between (conservatives) and SPD, which was rejected by voters.”
The transfer of the German government is carefully choreographed. On the eve of the vote on Monday, the outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz was treated with a traditional large tattoo by the Armed Forces Orchestra.
69-year-old Merz was expected to win the vote and then visit President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to take an oath, performing a long-standing ambition to become a German Chancellor.
His opponent and former chancellor Angela Merkel had come to Bundestag to watch the vote being held.
The immediate decision of Merz will now be to decide with his coalition partners whether he should insist on a second vote and take the risk of failing again.