Dear participants, the german constitution says that only when the parliament rejects a vote of confidence the chancellor has the right to ask the president to dissolve the parliament. The aim of Schroeder's tactics was to provoke such a rejection and then to have early elections in February 2002.
To my opinion, the best way to make this kind of tactics unattractive is to introduce the Swedish option. The Swedish option says that when the parliament is dissolved then the new parliament doesn't get a new full term, it gets only the rest of the regular term of the old parliament. Markus Schulze
