The new Chancellor of Germany, Merz, and all the members of the new government cabinet were sworn in on the 6th at the German Bundestag.
The Bundestag held a full session on the 6th to elect the new Chancellor, and after two rounds of voting, Merz won with 325 votes of support, becoming the Chancellor of Germany.
In the morning's first round of the Chancellor election, Merz received only 310 votes in favor, 6 short of the 316 votes needed to be elected Chancellor, and thus failed to be elected. 307 people voted against, 3 members abstained, one vote was invalid, and 9 members were absent.
The leaders of the parliamentary groups, including the Union and the Social Democratic Party, later held hours of closed-door meetings.
The new Bundestag has a total of 630 seats. The Union and the Social Democratic Party, which reached an agreement to form a coalition government, hold 208 and 120 seats respectively. As the Union has the most seats, Merz was conventionally nominated for Chancellor, but unexpectedly, Merz was unable to pass in the first round of the Chancellor election.
This broke the precedent in the Federal Republic of Germany's Chancellor elections, where no Chancellor candidate who had already reached an agreement with the ruling coalition before the election had ever been defeated in a parliamentary election.
Merz was born in 1955 in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He studied law in his early years and worked in legal affairs, entering the European Parliament as a member in 1989. Subsequently, he served as a member of the German Bundestag, chairman of the Union parliamentary group, and temporarily left politics after 2009. In 2018, following the announcement by the then Chancellor Merkel that she would not run for re-election, Merz returned to the political scene. After three elections, he became the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union in 2022, concurrently serving as the chairman of the Union parliamentary group.