Germany’s Scholz under pressure to hold quick confidence vote | U.S. & World [Video]

By Rachel More and Matthias Williams

BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany’s opposition conservatives urged Chancellor Olaf Scholz to allow a vote of confidence immediately and hold elections in January, the day after his rocky three-way coalition collapsed and plunged the country into political turmoil.

The coalition fell apart on Wednesday when years of tensions reached their peak in a row over how to plug a multi-billion-euro hole in the budget and how to revive Europe’s largest economy, which is headed for its second year of contraction.

The break-up creates a leadership vacuum at the heart of Europe just as it seeks to form a united response to Tuesday’s election of Republican Donald Trump to a second term as U.S. president on issues ranging from possible new U.S. trade tariffs to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the future of the NATO alliance.

Scholz, of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), said he fired his finance minister from the fiscally conservative …