(Bloomberg) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for a confidence vote on Jan. 15 and said he wants early elections by the end of March.

The move comes after the chancellor sacked Finance Minister Christian Lindner, stripping the three-party alliance of its parliamentary majority.

“Lindner often obstructed solutions and abused my trust,” Scholz said in a statement Thursday evening. “Lindner is interested in the short-term survival of his party. “Such egoism is completely incomprehensible.”

The conservative CDU/CSU alliance, led by Friedrich Merz, currently leads opinion polls with more than 30 percent of the vote and will take first place in early voting, returning to power after losing to Scholz’s SPD three years ago.

His move was not unexpected, given the coalition’s ongoing wrangling over the 2025 budget and how to deal with the challenges facing Europe’s largest economy.

Scholz argued that Germany needed “more financial room to maneuver” to cope with the challenges it faced.

“The situation is serious. “There is war in Europe, tensions are increasing in the Middle East, the economy is stagnating,” said Scholz. “Companies need support now.”

Scholz and his ministers have projected a dysfunctional image in recent weeks, holding rival meetings with industry groups and labor officials and issuing contradictory policy documents that resemble campaign manifestos.

Lindner’s insistence that Germany strictly adhere to rules limiting new borrowing has also been a matter of controversy. This irritated Scholz’s SPD and the Greens, who favor increasing debt to finance initiatives such as combating climate change and strengthening the military.

Speculations that Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections on Tuesday and possible shock waves in the global policy-making process would encourage Scholz and his associates to serve in the government for the sake of stability turned out to be inaccurate.

The FDP’s vote share is currently down to 3 percent, down from 11.5 percent in the 2021 elections, which puts it in danger of missing the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament.

Although the gap is likely to narrow, recent opinion polls show that support for Merz’s CDU/CSU is more than double that for Scholz’s party. The SPD is in third place with 16 percent of the votes, followed by the far-right Alternative for Germany with 17 percent of the votes.

The Greens are in fourth place with about 11 percent of the votes, while the new far-left party Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht is in fifth place with about 8 percent of the votes.

–With help from Alexander Weber.

(The first paragraph has been updated with the call for early elections.)

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