Flushed with near-failure, Friedrich Merz was sworn in as Germany‘s 10th federal chancellor on Tuesday afternoon. Seven hours late, the short ceremony in the Bundestag parliament chamber ended a long and dramatic day for the 69-year-old and concluded his remarkable political comeback.
Three years ago Merz returned from the political wilderness to secure the leadership of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union. Last February he led the party to victory in a snap federal election and, with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, concluded snappy coalition talks with the centre-left Social Democratic Party.
Merz was already on track to be Germany’s oldest leader since founding father Konrad Adenauer but, as the cameras rolled, Tuesday’s unexpected emotional rollercoaster aged him still further.
At 4:15pm, the afternoon sun streaming in from the glass Reichstag dome above, Merz bobbed his head from side to side with relief on hearing the numbers he needed.
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On the second attempt, some 325 MPs voted in favour of him as chancellor, nine more than required in the 630-seat parliament, with 289 MPs opposed and one abstention.
Only then did a small smile – as much relief as elation – steal across his lips. Late for an important date, Merz hurried to nearby Bellevue Palace to collect his official certificate of office from President Frank Walter Steinmeier.
[ Profile: Friedrich Merz known for impulsive shifts and rhetorical sharpshootingOpens in new window ]
An hour later Merz was back in the Bundestag to swear his oath on the original copy of the Basic Law, Germany’s postwar constitution. In the same chamber, seven hours earlier, his day had begun with an unprecedented public humiliation.
Shortly after 10am, announcing the first-round chancellor vote result, a nervous Bundestag president Julia Klöckner told shocked MPs that Merz had fallen six votes short of the 316 votes he required for an absolute majority.
“He is ... not elected chancellor of the federal republic of Germany,” she announced briskly. It was the first time those words had been uttered in the postwar Bundestag: until Tuesday, every German chancellor-designate had secured a parliamentary majority on the first vote.
As quickly as Merz disappeared the finger-pointing began, shocked silence in the chamber giving way to the buzz of speculation.
Acting chancellor Olaf Scholz walked around the chamber shaking his head − a crooked smile on his lips and hands in his pockets − unsure if he should cancel his future plans.
Meanwhile CDU and SPD spindoctors rushed outside to tell assembled journalists that it was their future coalition partner − not them − that didn’t have their backbenchers in line.
Given the secret ballot, no one knows for sure who revolted. But a common reason cited was CDU backbencher fury at a Merz U-turn, 10 days after the election, to back borrowing of €1 trillion for infrastructure and defence spending rather than promised reform and austerity measures.
As the stock market slid and news of the disaster flashed around the world, CDU/CSU and SPD leaders used emergency meetings to read their backbenchers the riot act.
Rather than wait, opposition parties agreed to change the Bundestag order of business for a second vote in the afternoon with the unofficial motto: once more with feeling.
In advance of that ballot, CDU parliamentary secretary Steffen Bilger warned assembled MPs that a successful chancellor vote was “about the ability of this state to act and the functioning of our democracy”.
Opposition parties slated the coalition’s parliamentary debut. Green parliamentary secretary Irene Michalic, glaring at Merz, warned of “far-reaching consequences for our country, generating an instability for which you, and only you, carry the responsibility”.
Across the chamber with the far-right Alternative for Germany, cheery Schadenfreude was the order of the day as its party floor leader Bernd Baumann described Merz as a “failure”.
After a dramatic day, Steinmeier, the president, urged the now chancellor Merz and his new ministers to get down to work in a “time where peace and freedom are under attack”.
As black smoke finally turned white over Berlin’s government quarter, Tuesday’s events made clear like never before how Germany’s political centre has shrunk in the last 20 years.
When Angela Merkel took office in 2005 with her first grand coalition, her CDU/CSU alliance with the SPD held 73 per cent of the seats in the Bundestag and a 140-seat majority.
The new, not-so-grand Merz coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD has 52 per cent of the seats and a 16-seat majority.
German political analysts agreed that Tuesday’s events were historic but differed on whether this early tremor would weaken – or weld together – the new government.
For political scientist Andrea Römmele, the long day in Berlin was a wake-up call for Merz, heading for his swearing-in “with two black eyes and wobbling knees” having learned that “his majority is not a given”.
Others suggested the dramatic day marked another step in the normalisation of German politics. Prof Ursula Münch, a Bavarian political scientist, pointed to how Article 65 of the postwar constitution allowed for repeated chancellor votes.
“This is not a crisis situation,” she said. “Our Basic Law is very stability-oriented and already foresaw such a situation, a situation familiar to other parliamentary systems.”
