Hello and welcome to the program. This is News Hour from the BBC World Service coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley.

The German Chancellor Olaf Schultz is about to face Parliament in Berlin to trigger a process intended to lead to elections next February.

His plan to get out of a political crisis after his

governing coalition fell apart last month is to lose a vote of confidence in him and go on to win a

second term. But the polls are against him, and so is the German economy, once seen as the powerhouse

of Europe. It's barely grown in six years. The BBC's Damien McGuinness

joins us live from Berlin now to make more sense of what is happening. Damien, welcome. This vote in

Parliament has to happen, doesn't it, for there to be an early general election? Yeah, that's right.

This is effectively, in most cases, the only way that a government can dissolve Parliament and spark early elections because it's all about creating stability in the system.

It's a rule that was set up by the founders of modern Germany. It's in the constitution. It's to avoid any sort of political chaos such as we saw in the Weimar Republic before the Second World War.

But what this means is that Olaf Schultz, as you correctly said,

Paul has his government collapsed in November over a row over the budget.

Since then, he's had a minority government with his partners, the Greens.

And what that means in practical terms is that he can't really do anything.

He can't push through new laws unless the

opposition conservatives agree and they're not likely to do that in most cases. So what it means is

that Germany has a lame duck government right now, can't really push through new ideas. And of course,

there's lots of things to deal with, as you say, the economy is stalled and there's various

different global crises which Germany needs to, you say, the economy is stalled, and there's various different

global crises which Germany needs to, you know, do what it can to resolve. And so Oloff Schultz

says his own, the only way forward, and he's putting this as a choice for Germany, is instead

of September when the elections should have taken place to hold them in February. And I think what we're seeing in this very fiery debate, which is still going on right now,

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