Germany is facing snap February poll after chancellor unexpectedly pulled plug on his coalition
A Social Democrat politician has become the first sitting SPD MP to call for the popular defence minister Boris Pistorius to run as the party’s candidate for chancellor in February’s snap elections instead of Olaf Scholz, in a sign of growing concern in the party over Scholz’s low approval ratings. Joe Weingarten, an SPD MP, told the Financial Times he believed Pistorius was the better candidate.
Weingarten was speaking as a senior SPD grandee, Franz Müntefering, a former vice-chancellor and Social Democrat leader, also questioned whether Scholz had a “prior claim to re-election”. “The candidacy for chancellor isn’t some kind of game where two or more candidates do a deal on it one evening over beer or at breakfast, or that includes some prior claim to re-election,” he told the newspaper Tagesspiegel.
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