
Germany’s snap election on Sunday, 23 February, has come against a backdrop of economic malaise in Europe’s largest economy. Patience with the incumbent Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democratic Party, had grown thin after two consecutive years of negative GDP growth. Mr Scholz said his hands had been tied by the German ‘debt brake’, a rule inserted into the German constitution by Angela Merkel in 2009 which limits the annual deficit of the federal government to 0.35% of GDP. But Mr Scholz’s political rival Friedrich Merz, the leader of Mrs Merkel’s former party the Christian Democratic Union and Christian