On Tuesday, May 6th, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative party in Germany, was elected as the Chancellor in the second round of voting after failing to garner enough votes in the first round.
The 69-year-old Merz, also known as Melz, is the candidate of the conservative alliance party (CDU/CSU). In the February election earlier this year, he led the alliance party to victory but didn’t secure enough votes to govern alone, necessitating the formation of a coalition government.
In the first round of voting, Merz received only 310 votes out of 630 lawmakers, falling short of the 316 votes required to become Chancellor. However, in the second round, he secured 325 votes, surpassing the threshold by 9 votes, and successfully became the German Chancellor.
On Monday, the CDU/CSU alliance led by Merz signed a coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). The departing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD suffered a heavy blow in the February election.
According to Deutsche Welle, the coalition composed of the CDU/CSU and the SPD holds a total of 328 seats, which should have provided enough support for Merz’s election. However, his initial failure in the first round of voting came as a surprise.
After the Tuesday voting concluded, Merz went to the nearby Bellevue Palace to receive the formal nomination from the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He then returned to the historic German parliamentary building in the city center of Berlin to be sworn in as the tenth Chancellor of Germany since the end of World War II.
Merz lacks previous experience working in the government, but he has pledged to offer stronger leadership than Scholz and engage more with key allies to restore Germany to a central position in Europe.