this video is brought to you by Ground News. Germany's coalition government has dramatically collapsed, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz firing his Finance Minister on Wednesday night and paving the way for a snap election early next year. So, in this video, we're going to explain why the coalition was fighting yet again, why Scholz has opted for an early election, and what might happen next. Before we start, if you haven't already, please consider subscribing and hitting the bell to stay in the loop and be notified when we release new videos. So, let's start with a reminder of how the so-called traffic light coalition came to be. Germany's last federal election back in September of 2021 saw Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party, or SPD, emerge as the largest party for the first time since 2002. But to form a government with a parliamentary majority, the SPD had to look to the third-place Greens and fourth-place Free Democratic Party, or FDP. It took two months of intense negotiations before an agreement was struck, which sort of foreshadowed

some of the challenges that the government would go ahead to face Schultz as a head of the SPD naturally became the German Chancellor. Green co-leader Robert Harbeck became Vice Chancellor and Economic Affairs and Climate Minister, and the FDP's Christian Lintner became the Finance Minister. However, any common ground that was reached as part of the Coalition agreement faded pretty quickly, and the three parties have been at loggerheads for much of their term. As well as dealing with the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Coalition within a matter of months of taking to office had to face the many challenges that arose out of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The coalition's popularity has since crashed, and a recent poll for ARD showed that 85% of Germans are less satisfied or not at all satisfied with the current government. Individually, the SPD, Greens, and FDP are all polling very poorly, which we'll come on to later, and some 54% of Germans apparently favor early Federal elections. Now one of the

major challenges facing the government at the moment and causing arguments within it is the dire state of the German economy. Germany's GDP is expected to stagnate this year, having contracted last year, and the IMF forecasts a mega 0.8% growth for 2025, the weakest expected performance among major economies. Symptomatic of Germany's economic woes is the crisis facing the country's largest manufacturer, Volkswagen, which may have to close several production sites in its home country for the first time in its 87-year history. Now, a key moment in the long downfall of the Coalition was the November 2023 ruling by the federal constitutional court that declared part of the government's budget policy unconstitutional, ultimately leaving the government some 60 billion EUR short. The Coalition leaders would then go on to publicly clash over how to plug the billions of Euros of holes in the budget. Now, it was in this context the most recent Coalition feud erupted last week, an 18-page policy proposal paper from the FDP's Christian Lindner was

leaked that contains his ideas to boost the economy and cut costs. Among his proposals were cuts to social spending, a moratorium on new regulations, scrapping Germany's solidarity tax, and rolling back some of the more ambitious National Climate policies in favor of European ones. Now, none of this is particularly surprising for the FDP, given their free market fiscally conservative credentials. However, these are really quite at odds with the SPD and Green positions, and therefore the leaked documents raised tensions within the Coalition. In fact, many have compared the leaked paper to a 1982 letter by the then Finance Minister, also of the FDP, that advocated various reforms at odds with SPD policy, an event which preceded the collapse of the SPD government. It's unsurprising then that through the first half of this week, Chancellor Schultz launched into crisis talks with his Coalition Partners. Both Schultz and Vice Chancellor Harbeck of the Greens had warned that the Coalition should stay together. Harbeck said on Monday that this is the worst time for our government to fall, given what's

happening in Ukraine with regard to the economic situation in Germany and with regard to the American election. Harbeck himself had proposed his own ideas recently too, including stimulating the economy through significant investments, but Linda dismissed this as a sign of conceptual helplessness. Ultimately, this boils down to core differences between the coalition parties. On the one side, you've got the left-leaning parties who want to allow for more spending. The SPD, for example, opposed cutting social programs, and the Greens sought to invest big in green measures. On the other side, the FDP, which demanded adherence to Germany's strict budgetary and debt limits. With deadlines fast approaching for next year's federal budget, there wasn't much time for the coalition to settle this dispute. Things finally came to a head on Wednesday evening with crisis talks obviously falling apart. Schultz then announced that he had fired Lindner as Finance Minister, saying it was necessary to prevent harm to our country and that all too often Minister Lindner had blocked laws in an inappropriate manner. Too often he had

engaged in petty party politics tactics too often. He has broken my trust. Linda had also refused to ease fiscal rules, saying that doing so would have violated his oath of office. Now, with Lintner, Sack, Schultz announced that he would table a no-confidence vote in his own government on January 15th, which, if as expected he loses, would set up a snap election by the end of March, bringing the current timetable for elections forward. Now, this collapse of the coalition feels like it's been a long time coming, and the FDP's actions are effectively seen as having provoked Schultz into firing Lintner. And there is actually a political calculation here for the FDP. All three coalition parties are polling badly, but it's particularly dire for the FDP, who are hovering under the 5% threshold needed to secure any parliamentary seats, meaning that they risk a total wipeout of the next election. In the face of this existential threat, then the FDP leadership probably saw picking fights with the coalition and ultimately leaving it as necessary.

to gain credit from conservatives and business-minded voters. In fact, Lintner's own policy paper we mentioned earlier has been described as reading like an election campaign program for the FDP. Schulz has justified waiting until January for the no-confidence vote by saying that he wants to spend the remaining time trying to get the most important legislation through, things like the budget and defense legislation, which he'll reach out to opposition leader Friederick MZ for parliamentary support on. But MZ's conservative CDU is calling on Schulz to hold an election as soon as possible rather than delaying. Regardless of whether the election is held on Schulz's timeline or earlier, all signs point to a changing government in Germany. The CDU/CSU continues to comfortably hold first place in the polls, a position that it's held for more than 2 years, while the SPD and Greens remain in third and fourth place behind the far-right AfD. Having ended 16 years of CDU government just three years ago, Schulz faces the very real prospect

of becoming the latest victim of the anti-incumbent trend that's been sweeping the world. With Tuesday marking the most recent example of an electorate kicking out an incumbent party, with Kamala Harris conceding the election to Trump, a story which was covered by over 200 news outlets around the world, 37% of which lean left while 23% lean right. The way they framed this story was different though, with right-leaning outlets tending to focus on her concession while those on the left emphasized her insistence on continuing the fight even post-defeat. These stories are similar in the framing but that's very different now. All of this analysis is possible thanks to our sponsor Ground News, a website and app developed by a former NASA engineer on a mission to give readers an easy data-driven objective way to read the news. They pull in stories from all over the world and organize them by story, with each story coming with a quick visual breakdown of the political bias, factuality, and ownership of the sources reporting all

backed by racings from three Independent News monitoring organizations. One of my favorite features is their blind spot feed, which shows you stories underreported by one side of the political spectrum or the other. For example, if you lean left, you might have missed this story where China congratulates Trump and encourages cooperation between the two nations, with the story far more exposed on the right than the left. Crown news is such an incredibly useful platform that captures information you just can't get anywhere else. It's especially useful when you're looking at news stories from around the world, as I'm sure our very global audience often does. If you're not familiar with the media market, it's hard to know who you should trust, so ground guidance can prove invaluable, whether you're a European trying to unpack the US election or an American trying to understand the Bulgarian one. Okay, the latter does sound less likely. Best of all, grounder is currently offering our viewers a 50% discount on their Vantage plan, which includes unlimited access to

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Germany's Government Finally Collapses: What Next?

Germany's Government Finally Collapses: What Next?