Olaf Scholz has been voted in as Germany’s new chancellor. He has been described as being very similar to Angela Merkel and its the reason why he was elected so swiftly.
Scholz got the support of 395 politicians in the Bundestag on Wednesday morning and will replace Angela Merkel, who is standing down after 16 years.
The vote was not a surprise. Scholz’s SPD and its coalition partners, the Free Democrats and the Greens, have 416 seats in the 736 lower house of the German parliament.
Olaf Scholz – Germany’s new chancellor
Scholz said on Tuesday that the new government — which forces Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into opposition for the first time since 2005 — “takes up the major challenges of this decade and well beyond that”.
If it succeeds, he said, “that is a mandate to be re-elected together at the next election”.
Scholz, 63, has been Germany’s vice-chancellor and finance minister since 2018 and is a former mayor of the city of Hamburg.
A former lawyer who joined the Social Democrats at 17, Scholz had been positioning himself to succeed Merkel for some time.
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