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Germany’s conservative leader falls short by six votes in the first round of voting that he was widely expected to win.
Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has failed in his bid to become the country’s 10th chancellor, falling short by just six votes in the first round of voting in the Bundestag.
Merz, who had been widely expected to win the parliamentary vote, needed 316 votes to win in the secret ballot held on Tuesday, but he received only 310 votes.
The failure to win the required majority means that the political parties will now regroup to discuss the next steps.
The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, has 14 days to elect a chancellor, either Merz or another candidate, who will need an outright majority. The next voting session could take place next Tuesday.
Merz’s CDU/CSU conservatives had topped the polls in the national elections in February with 28.5 percent of the vote, but they still require at least one coalition partner to form a majority government.
On Monday, the CDU/CSU reached an agreement with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), who secured just 16.4 percent in the elections after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government last year.
If the vote were to pass, the two parties would have a slim majority, with just 328 seats in the Bundestag out of a total of 630.
The newly formed coalition had set ambitious goals, including stimulating economic growth, boosting defence spending, and tightening immigration policies in response to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second in the vote.
The CDU and SPD have governed Germany together in the past, most recently in three of the four terms of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led the country from 2005 to 2021.