The day that should have marked Friedrich Merz’s political coronation started in a celebratory mood.
Overlooking a packed parliament floor, future cabinet ministers, honoured guests and family sat in the upper tribunes of the Bundestag, dressed in their Sunday best to witness the election of the Christian Democrat as postwar Germany’s 10th chancellor.
Among the attendees, former chancellor — and longtime Merz rival — Angela Merkel sat chatting with outgoing finance minister Jörg Kukies and future economy minister Katherina Reiche. Merz’s wife, Charlotte, flanked by the couple’s two daughters, waved and smiled.
Then Bundestag president Julia Klöckner delivered the stunning news: Merz had fallen short of the required absolute majority — a first in the 80-year history of the Federal Republic. The conservative leader, who had reportedly driven 10 litres of beer to Berlin from his Sauerland home to celebrate taking office, fell six votes short of the 316 required even though his coalition holds 328 seats.
With the audience left in shock, Merz and his coalition partner Lars Klingbeil, the co-leader of the Social Democrats and future vice-chancellor, retreated to their quarters to take stock. Furious efforts began to find the dissenters and muster the numbers to reschedule a second round of voting. A few hours later Merz finally secured the majority he needed.
But the episode shattered something that newly elected chancellors prize most: authority. The vote was the most vivid possible example of the challenge Merz will face throughout his term. The 69-year-old chancellor is on a mission to reform Europe’s largest economy at a time of political and economic upheaval — and he depends on a razor-thin parliamentary majority to do it.
“Historic. This is absolutely historic. No chancellor has ever lost a first vote,” said political scientist Andrea Römmele in the Bundestag. “No one expected this.”
“It shows how fragile the whole coalition is,” Römmele added. “This has weakened him, just as everyone in Europe is watching and waiting for Germany to come back.”
There could be few worse omens for the new coalition after an intense six-month electoral cycle, which was supposed to draw a line under years of bickering under the outgoing Olaf Scholz-led coalition, which collapsed in November.
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, and her faction revelled in the upset. She called for new elections between the rounds of voting, while her co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, declared: “It is a good day for Germany.”
With a total of 328 seats in parliament, Merz’s coalition between his CDU, Bavarian sister party the CSU and the SPD has a 13-seat majority.
With no way of identifying the dissenters in a secret ballot but with only a handful of votes missing, Merz and Klingbeil decided their best option was to reschedule the vote the same day while the MPs were all in the capital. Their hope: that those who used their vote as a protest would have realised the gravity of their choices by then.
Rumours swirled from CDU corners that the dissenters were SPD MPs unhappy with Klingbeil. They did not agree with his cabinet appointments the day before and many were angered at his swift move, in the wake of the SPD’s worst electoral results since 1887, to cement his power by seizing the leadership of his party’s parliamentary grouping — or so went the theory.
But SPD MPs rejected the blame. They pointed to public signs of irritation at Merz within his own conservative bloc after he suddenly embraced a loosening of the country’s constitutional borrowing limit and a €1tn spending package for the military and infrastructure.
“Merz has offended a lot of people. Klingbeil has offended a lot of people too,” Römmele said.
One top CDU official, having lunch with staff in one of the Bundestag’s restaurants while waiting anxiously to see if a second vote could take place on Tuesday, insisted that he had no way of knowing whether members of the CDU-CSU had voted against Merz.
“I would have said that we were united,” he said. “But the SPD would probably have said the same. We’ll never find out because it was a secret ballot.”
The snag comes as Germany faces acute external and internal challenges undermining the foundations of the country’s renaissance after the second world war.
Long a staunch Atlanticist, Merz must deal with an unreliable and increasingly hostile US administration under Donald Trump that is seeking to reduce its defence commitment to Europe, which has been the bedrock of Germany’s postwar security.
Trump’s threat to impose trade tariffs on EU goods could tip the export-oriented nation into contraction this year, after several years of stagnation.
The hiatus was a humiliating spectacle by any measure. Outgoing SPD chancellor Scholz, who had received the traditional farewell from the Bundeswehr’s brass band the previous evening, headed back to the chancellery.
A series of ceremonies scheduled for Tuesday afternoon for the handover between old and new ministers were put on hold, and a planned trip to visit French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron in Paris the following day was thrown into doubt.
At home Merz has billed his coalition with the SPD as the mainstream parties’ last-ditch attempt to stop the rise of the far-right AfD. The party, which finished second in the February elections with more than a fifth of the votes, is neck-and-neck in the polls with the CDU and is aiming for a first-place finish in the next elections, scheduled for 2029.
But some analysts sought to play down the significance of the shortlived drama. In 1949, CDU chief Konrad Adenauer was elected chancellor in parliament by one vote, as was Helmut Kohl, another CDU chancellor, in 1994.
“It’s a one-off, a few MPs wanted to send a signal,” said Andreas Busch, political science professor at Göttingen university. “Merz has the support for his coalition.”
“Today’s events have been a wake-up call, but it does not cast a lasting shadow over the Merz administration,” said Armin Steinbach, professor at Paris-based business school HEC. “Voters forget. If the government is successful, no one will remember this.”
He added: “The message to Merz is that he must become a unifying figure, less polarising than in the past.”
