Pressure mounts on German government to call snap elections like Macron

5 months ago 18

Following the crushing defeat of Germany’s governing coalition parties in the EU elections, high-profile opposition figures are urging German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to call snap elections, as French President Emmanuel Macron did after his party was decimated by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

Scholz’s SPD (S&D) and its coalition partners, the liberal FDP (Renew Europe) and the Greens, won a combined 30.4% of the vote on Sunday, barely more than the winner, the centre-right CDU/CSU (30%), won on its own.

“The election result was bad for all three government parties,” Scholz admitted on Monday evening.

“It now has to be the benchmark for everyone to make an effort and resolve the challenges ahead,” he told journalists in Berlin.

In the wake of the landslide defeat, leading opposition figures urged Scholz to follow the example of French President Emmanuel Macron (Renaissance/Renew Europe), who called snap parliamentary elections after the far-right trounced his party in the weekend’s European elections.

“This government is basically over. Now it has to be similar, like in France,” Bavaria’s state premier, Markus Söder (CSU/EPP), a dominant figure in the party at the state and national level, told RTL/NTV.

“We need a fresh start for our country. The [coalition] has no mandate, no trust in the population anymore, and that’s why there should be a snap election as soon as possible,” he continued.

CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he would “not exclude such a scenario”, while German media quoted other anonymous party sources as backing snap elections.

The government, for its part, rejected the calls: “The regular election date is next autumn, and we plan to implement this,” a spokesman told reporters.

The Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP/Renew Europe) also backed Scholz, saying there was no reason to question the coalition’s confidence in the chancellor.

Meanwhile, experts argue that the parallels between Germany and France call into question the Franco-German leadership on EU decisions such as top jobs, mid-term priorities, enlargement and reform.

“The [German] government has been severely punished. (…) The same in France. So we do not expect leadership from France and Germany at the moment,” said Johannes Lindner, co-director of the Jacques Delors Centre think-tank.

(Nick Alipour, Jonathan Packroff and Oliver Noyan | Euractiv.de)