Olaf Scholz will become Germany's new chancellor on Wednesday with a vote in parliament that the SPD leader and his liberal and green allies are expected to comfortably win.
Scholz needs the support of at least 369 politicians in the Bundestag to be elected to replace Angela Merkel, who is standing down after 16 years.
The SPD and its coalition partners, the Free Democrats and the Greens, have 416 seats in the 736 lower house of the German parliament.
Scholz said on Tuesday that the new government -- which forces Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into opposition for the first time since 2005 -- "takes up the major challenges of this decade and well beyond that".
If it succeeds, he said, “that is a mandate to be re-elected together at
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