In December 2021, who among the following succeeded Angela Merkel as the Chancellor of Germany?
- (a)Olaf Scholz
- (b)Annalena Baerbock
- (c)Armin Laschet
- (d)Jana Puglierin
Correct — A, Olaf Scholz. The Bundestag elected Scholz Chancellor on 8 December 2021 by 395 votes to 303, ending Angela Merkel's sixteen years in office. He led the Social Democratic Party, which had narrowly topped the poll at the federal election of September 2021, and he formed the country's first three-party federal coalition — the Social Democrats with the Greens and the Free Democrats, known from the parties' colours as the traffic-light coalition. Scholz had been Merkel's own Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister in the preceding grand coalition, and before that mayor of Hamburg, so the handover was between colleagues as much as between rivals.
- (b)Annalena Baerbock — Annalena Baerbock led the Greens into the 2021 election as their chancellor candidate and finished third. She became Foreign Minister in Scholz's cabinet rather than Chancellor.
- (c)Armin Laschet — Armin Laschet was the chancellor candidate of Merkel's own CDU and CSU bloc and the man widely expected to succeed her. His campaign faltered, the bloc recorded its worst federal result, and he did not take the office.
- (d)Jana Puglierin — Jana Puglierin was not one of the three chancellor candidates of the 2021 German federal election, and did not become Chancellor. The name is the filler option in this set.
The German Chancellor is the head of government and is elected by the Bundestag, not directly by voters; the federal President is a largely ceremonial head of state. Because German elections rarely give one party a majority, the Chancellor is whoever can assemble a coalition, and the coalition agreement is negotiated over weeks after polling day. That is why the September 2021 election and the December 2021 election of the Chancellor are separate events with separate dates, and why a question can reasonably ask who succeeded Merkel 'in December 2021'.
Heads-of-government items are the most perishable facts in any general-knowledge paper, so they are worth learning with their dates attached rather than as current status. Anchored to this exam, the answer is Scholz, elected on 8 December 2021. The distractor design is instructive: two of the three wrong names are the other chancellor candidates of the same election, so a candidate who remembers the contest but not the result has a two-in-three chance of going wrong. Anchoring to the coalition helps — the traffic-light coalition is Social Democrat-led, and Scholz was the Social Democrat. The present-day position has since changed twice over: Scholz's coalition broke up, the federal election of 23 February 2025 put the Social Democrats third, and Friedrich Merz succeeded him as Chancellor in 2025.
- Olaf Scholz was elected Chancellor of Germany by the Bundestag on 8 December 2021, by 395 votes to 303.
- He succeeded Angela Merkel, who had held the office since 2005.
- Scholz belongs to the Social Democratic Party and formed a coalition with the Greens and the Free Democrats.
- Annalena Baerbock of the Greens and Armin Laschet of the CDU and CSU were the other chancellor candidates in the September 2021 election; Baerbock became Foreign Minister.
- Scholz's chancellorship ran from 2021 to 2025; Friedrich Merz succeeded him after the federal election of 23 February 2025.
- Picking the losing chancellor candidates, Laschet or Baerbock, from memory of the campaign rather than the result.
- Confusing the Chancellor with the federal President, who is head of state and largely ceremonial.
- Carrying a 2021 answer forward as the present position. Scholz left office in 2025.
As a who-holds-this-office item tied to a date, or as a match between countries and heads of government.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Chancellor of Germany is
- (a)directly elected by the people
- (b)elected by the Bundestag
- (c)appointed by the federal President at his discretion
- (d)chosen by the Bundesrat
Answer(b) elected by the Bundestag — which is why the Chancellor is whoever can command a coalition majority in that house.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Olaf Scholz's government formed in December 2021 was a coalition of the Social Democrats with
- (a)the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democrats
- (b)the Greens and the Free Democrats
- (c)the Greens and the Left
- (d)the Christian Social Union and the Greens
Answer(b) the Greens and the Free Democrats — the three-party arrangement nicknamed the traffic-light coalition after the parties' colours.