Germany is on course for an early election in February after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in parliament.
Of the 717 MPs who had their say in the lower house, or Bundestag, only 207 supported the country’s leader, while 394 opposed him and 116 abstained.
That left him far short of the majority of 367 needed to win in the 733-seat chamber.
Mr Scholz, leader of Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), had governed as the head of a fractious three-party coalition until it collapsed last month when he sacked his finance minister.
He had weeks of disputes with Christian Lindner over how to kick-start Germany’s stagnant economy, the largest in Europe, and said at the time the minister had “broken my trust too often”.
Mr Lindner and his colleagues in the Free Democrats Party (FDP) promptly quit the coalition, leaving the SPD and their remaining partner, the Greens, without a majority in parliament.
Several major party leaders have since agreed to bring parliamentary elections forward by seven months to 23 February.
Germany’s constitution does not allow the Bundestag to dissolve itself, so a confidence vote was needed to set in motion the early election.
Mr Scholz had been expected to lose the vote as the SPD holds only 207 seats in the chamber and the Greens had planned to abstain.
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Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now has three weeks to decide whether to dissolve the Bundestag. Once parliament is dissolved, the election must be held within 60 days.
Speaking to MPs on Monday, Mr Scholz said an election would determine if “we, as a strong country, dare to invest strongly in our future; do we have confidence in ourselves and our country, or do we put our future on the line?”
He added: “Do we risk our cohesion and our prosperity by delaying long-overdue investments?”
Polls show Mr Scholz’s party trailing behind his centre-right challenger, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Friedrich Merz heads the CDU and is favourite to become the new chancellor. Pic: AP
In the Bundestag, Mr Merz told the chancellor “you’re leaving the country in one of its biggest economic crises in postwar history”.
“You’re standing here and saying, business as usual, let’s run up debt at the expense of the younger generation, let’s spend money, and the word ‘competitiveness’ of the German economy didn’t come up once in the speech you gave today,” he said.
Vice chancellor Robert Habeck, whose Greens are further behind in polling, is also bidding for the top job.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is polling strongly, has nominated Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor, but is thought to have no chance of taking the job because other parties refuse to work with it.
AfD won a regional election in the eastern state of Thuringia in September, claiming 32.8% of the vote and beating the CDU – which won 23.6%.
