Germany's No-Confidence Rule Requires You Name a Replacement

On 27 April 1972, Rainer Barzel walked into the Bundestag with the votes — he thought — to replace Willy Brandt as chancellor. Brandt's SPD-FDP coalition had been bleeding deputies over Ostpolitik, the opening to East Germany, and the math on paper said Barzel would win. The tally came back 247 yes, 10 no, three abstentions. Barzel needed 249. He fell two votes short. Years later it would emerge that the East German Stasi had paid at least one CDU deputy to vote against the motion.

The rule that saved Brandt was Article 67 of the 1949 Basic Law. It is a small but heavy edit to standard parliamentary practice: the Bundestag cannot vote a chancellor out unless, in the same motion, it elects a named successor by an absolute majority of all members. No interim governments. No dissolutions on a bad week. The chamber either has a working majority for someone else, or the incumbent stays.

The drafters of the Basic Law had a specific failure in mind. The Weimar Reichstag could topple a cabinet with a bare negative majority — Communists and Nazis voting together against the center — without anyone being able to form a replacement. Between 1919 and 1933, more than twenty governments fell that way. Article 67 was designed so that destructive coalitions could not bring down a government they did not also intend to govern in place of.

It has succeeded once. On 1 October 1982, Helmut Kohl beat Helmut Schmidt 256 to 235 after the FDP switched coalition partners. Kohl became chancellor without a general election and held the office for sixteen years. The rule has since been borrowed by Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland, Lesotho, Israel, and Albania — every one of them looking at the same Weimar lesson.