German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier announced that he dissolved the German parliament. A snap election will be held in February.
“I have decided to dissolve the 20th German Bundestag to fix the date for an early election for February 23rd,” he said, according to DW.
“It is precisely in difficult times like these that stability requires a government capable of taking action and a reliable majority in parliament,” Steinmeier noted. “Therefore I am convinced that for the good of our country new elections are the right way.”
Steinmeier warned against interference in the election, saying that it is “a danger to democracy, whether it is covert, as was evidently the case recently in the Romanian elections, or open and blatant, as is currently being practiced particularly intensively on platform X,” the AP reported.
“Hatred and violence must have no place in this election campaign, nor denigration or intimidation… all this is poison for democracy,” he said.
The announcement comes as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in parliament this month.
Ahead of the vote, Scholz said it would be up to voters to “determine the political course of our country.”
207 MPs voted for Scholz, while 394 voted against him and 116 abstained from the vote. Scholz told lawmakers that the upcoming election will determine whether “we, as a strong country, dare to invest strongly in our future; do we have confidence in ourselves and our country, or do we put our future on the line? Do we risk our cohesion and our prosperity by delaying long-overdue investments?”
