Chancellor Olaf Scholz has formally set Germany on course for an early election by requesting a confidence vote in parliament next week.
Five weeks after his three-party governing coalition collapsed in a dispute over how to revitalise Germany’s stagnant economy, Mr Scholz’s office said he had requested the confidence vote in parliament’s lower house, or Bundestag, for Monday.
The aim is to hold a parliamentary election on February 23, seven months earlier than originally scheduled.
Mr Scholz is expected to lose Monday’s vote. His centre-left Social Democrats hold 207 seats in the Bundestag and their remaining coalition partners, the environmentalist Greens, have 117.
That leaves his government well short of a majority in the 733-seat chamber.
The confidence vote is needed because Germany’s post-Second World War constitution does not allow parliament to dissolve itself.
If Mr Scholz loses the vote, it is up to President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to decide whether to dissolve the Bundestag.
He has 21 days to make that decision, and once parliament is dissolved, the election must be held within 60 days.
Polls show Mr Scholz’s party trailing behind the main opposition centre-right Union bloc of challenger Friedrich Merz.
Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, whose Greens are further behind, is also bidding for the top job.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is polling strongly, has nominated Alice Weidel as its candidate for chancellor, but has no chance of taking the job because other parties refuse to work with it.
Germany has not had a confidence vote since 2005, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroder called and lost one as he engineered an early election that was narrowly won by centre-right challenger Angela Merkel.
