“It’s important that Germany gets a stable government,” Lars Klingbeil, the incoming SPD vice chancellor, told reporters in Berlin.
Friedrich Merz will make another attempt to secure parliamentary backing as Germany’s next chancellor later on Tuesday after his humiliating shock loss in an initial vote.
The conservative leader earlier in the day fell short of a majority in a secret ballot in the Bundestag to confirm him as the head of a ruling coalition of his center-right CDU/CSU bloc and the center-left Social Democrats.
