Senior SPD figures hold talks on candidate for chancellor amid speculation about switch to popular defence minister

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is under mounting pressure to step aside as his party’s candidate for the job in February’s snap election in favour of his defence minister, Boris Pistorius, the most popular politician in the country.

The top brass of the Social Democratic party (SPD) are planning crisis talks on their choice of chancellor candidate for the 23 February general election on Tuesday evening while Scholz is flying home from the G20 summit in Brazil, local media reported.

Pro-business party internally referred to its plans as ‘D-day’

Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, who collapsed Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition earlier this month in a dispute over the budget, reportedly plotted their exit weeks before the final split, referring to their plans internally as “D-day”.

Newspapers Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the FDP had intended from at least September to force a situation that would provoke the German chancellor into pulling the plug on his tripartite coalition.

Chancellor makes fiery appeal in parliament for opposition support ‘for the good of the country’

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has defended his decision to oust his finance minister, which has led to the break up of his government, arguing that the survival of the alliance would have come at the expense of national stability and international security.

Scholz used his first speech to parliament since his “traffic light coalition” lost its majority to plead for national cohesion. He called on opposition parties to support his minority government in the months before early elections to prevent Germany from becoming as polarised as the US.

At times it felt like the three parties thought they were governing three completely different countries

Germany’s coalition government, which collapsed in dramatic fashion on Wednesday night after almost three years in power, was always an odd throuple.

A pact between three parties with three quite different histories and different priorities, it was made up of two outfits that have traditionally located themselves on the left of the political spectrum – the Social Democratic party (SPD) and the Greens – and one, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), that had until then been a loyal junior partner to the conservatives.

Unexpected move throws Europe’s largest economy into political disarray and is likely to lead to snap elections in March

The German government has collapsed after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, unexpectedly sacked his finance minister, plunging Europe’s largest economy into political disarray.

Christian Lindner was thrown out of the three-way coalition during a meeting of high-level government members on Wednesday evening, after months of bitter infighting that has contributed to the administration’s growing unpopularity.