Incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suffered an embarrassing setback when he fell short of a majority in an initial vote in the lower house of parliament, potentially delaying his swearing-in as head of government due to take place later on Tuesday.
For more context:
Both parties together have a majority and coaltion talks have already been done. If every single party member votes yes, this should be no problem. In theory.
This result shows how massively unpopular Merz really is, going down in history as a failure BEFORE he even got a chance to fuck up at his actual job.
He will probably be voted in during the second (or even third) round, but this may sow discontent and suspicion in the parties. The vote was anonymous, so you cant easily figure out who broke the line, potentially leading to poisoning the coalition.
Either way, we now have Friedrich “Zweite Wahl” Merz
Edit: Spelling
Do you know what makes people say he will probably be voted in in a later round? We don’t really know anything about why coalition party members voted against, right? Is it just that a reasonable explanation is that people wanted to keep him on his toes, but that’s that?
Two reasons. First, the required majority can be lowered to vote him in with a simple majority, if no absolute majority can be achieved (this will not happen right away). Second, the members who broke rank probably only wanted to send a message, so it’s likely that they’ll change their vote back to the party line (this may happen fairly soon).
Ah right, that makes sense, thanks! (Thanks to the other repliers as well.)
For the second round he would once again require 316 “yes”-votes (50% +1 vote) of the entire parliament. It’s possible that the first round was intended as a warning since cdu and SPD have a majority.
In a third round he would only need the majority of votes the MPs that are present during the vote.
Because there a “phases” for the election of the chancellor. The first one just failed. We are now in the second one where the parlament can vote again (once or as many times as they like) if Merz isn’t elected after 14 days we will enter phase 3.
The big difference then beeing the needed majority changing from absolute to relative. Merz already had the relativ majority in this first round so it is more or less sure that he will get at least this numbers and will get elected at this point.
In theory this “relative win” could then be vetoed by the federal president but again unlikely with Steinmeier (SPD and big advocate of Union + SPD governments) being in this position.