GERMANY: Chancellor Gerhard Schröder deliberately brought down his own government after seven years in office yesterday, telling voters to decide in early elections the future direction of Germany's reforms.
Mr Schröder abstained from a confidence vote in his own leadership, along with 147 other SPD politicians, and asked the president to dissolve parliament and call an autumn election.
"If this [ reform] agenda is to continue and be developed further - and it must - then a mandate through elections is indispensable," said a pale-faced Mr Schröder to a packed Bundestag.
In the visitor benches above sat his wife Doris and his 91- year-old mother Erika.
"The goal of holding on to power for power's sake never justifies going against one's better judgment and the advice of one's conscience," he said.
Mr Schröder used what may have been his last speech to the Bundestag as chancellor to defend his government's Agenda 2010 reform programme as a painful but necessary evil designed to rescue Germany's welfare state.
But he admitted that voters had rejected his pain-now, gain-later cutbacks in state elections, and the series of defeats had caused a debilitating directional debate within the SPD.
"This debate has led to SPD members threatening to join a backward, left populist party that is not afraid of xenophobia," he said, in a nod to former-ally-turned-rival Oskar Lafontaine, who is heading the new left party.
This wavering loyalty put his thin majority into question and has hobbled his reform plans.
Making things worse, he said, were the Christian Democrats (CDU), who used their "destructive blocking" majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, to put "power-obsessed party politics above the interests of the country".
Germany could not afford a year of reform paralysis, the chancellor said, calling his decision for early elections "a fair and sincere offer to the people, my political party, this great house and to myself".
Opposition leader Angela Merkel thanked Mr Schröder for his decision and said she shared his lack of confidence in his government's "piecemeal politics".
"Never before has a government through continuous improvements actually improved nothing, and gambled away the people's trust," said Dr Merkel. "Trust is the lubricant of our democracy."
She got the biggest laughs in an otherwise sombre parliamentary sitting when she mistakenly named as her future coalition partner the SPD and not the FDP (Liberal Free Democrats).
Her correction of the slip, Freudian or otherwise, was lost in laughter. She then attacked the SPD-Green government's "ability to act" before correcting herself and criticising its "inability to act".
Foreign minister Joschka Fischer pushed aside his prepared speech to defend the SPD-Green Party coalition and let fly at the CDU and its 48 per cent opinion-poll rating.
"At the moment, with your opinion polls, you strike me as a magnificent-looking soufflé in the oven," he shouted. "We'll see in the last three weeks, when the voters prick it, what's really left of this splendour."
Mr Schröder looked a little deflated himself when the vote result was read out, but betrayed no sign of emotion at the end of his term of office.
He shook hands with Mr Fischer and threw a last, lingering look over his shoulder into the Bundestag chamber before hurrying off to inform President Horst Köhler of the vote.
Mr Köhler has 21 days to decide for or against early elections. Several parliamentarians have threatened already to challenge Mr Schröder's move in the constitutional court.