Merz confirmed as German leader after first-round loss

Friedrich Merz has been confirmed as the new chancellor of Germany after a second vote in the country’s parliament, hours after falling six votes short at the first attempt in an unprecedented and humiliating defeat.

- TOM WATLING

The 69-year-old had been expected to smoothly win the vote to become Germany’s 10th chancellor since the Second World War. But no other post-war candidate for chancellor has failed to win on the first of the secret ballots – a significant blow to Mr Merz’s prestige.

Mr Merz, who led his conservatives to a federal election victory in February and signed a coalition deal with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), won just 310 votes in the Bundestag in the first vote in the morning, six short of an absolute majority. At least 18 coalition legislators failed to back him, although the secret nature of the ballot means it may never be known whether it was members of his centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), or members of the SPD that voted against him.

The SPD’s poor performance in February’s election, the worst in its post-war history, means the coalition is one of the slimmest majorities in decades, holding just 52 per cent of the vote. The SPD and the CDU had spent months making concessions to one another to form a viable coalition. The SPD had come under fire from some of its younger ranks for agreeing to the CDU’s tougher migration rules and cuts to employment benefits.