German parliament dissolved, polls on Feb.23

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier dissolved parliament on Friday and confirmed the expected February date for an early general election after the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government last month.

Scholz’s coalition was brought down by internal fights about how to revive Europe’s largest economy but a deadly car-ramming attack at a Christmas market last week has renewed the country’s heated debates over security and immigration.

Confirming the Feb.23 date for the election, Steinmeier emphasised the need for “political stability” and appealed for the campaign to be “conducted with respect and decency.”

A Saudi doctor, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, 50, was arrested at the scene of the attack on the Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg which left five people dead and more than 200 injured.

Interior Minister Nancy Fraser has said Abdulmohsen’s exact motive remains unclear.

In the wake of the attack, Scholz appealed to Germans to “link arms” and to not allow “hatred to determine our coexistence.”

The conservative CDU/CSU is leading in the polls on around 32 per cent under its leader Friedrich Merz and even before last week’s attack it had been promising a harder line on immigration as well as a rightward shift on social and economic policy.

On Friday Merz wrote about the attack in his newsletter, pointing to the suspect’s previous criminal record and asking: “Why don’t we get rid of such people before they do something this awful?”

If necessary, the law should be changed to make such deportations possible, he said.

In second place in the polls on 19 per cent is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which held what it called a “memorial” rally in Magdeburg on Monday.

At the event, the AfD’s regional leader Jan Wenzel Schmidt said Germany could “no longer take in madmen from all over the world” and demanded the country “close the borders.”

Steinmeier also said on Friday that he wanted “the campaign to be conducted with fair and transparent means” and warned of the dangers of “foreign influence... which is particularly intense on X,” the social media platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

“Hatred and violence must have no place in this election campaign, nor denigration or intimidation... all this is poison for democracy,” Steinmeier said.

Scholz’s Social Democrats are lagging badly in polls on just 15 per cent.

Agence France-Presse