What happened
The Ampel coalition's underlying tension was structural from the start: the FDP's commitment to a strict constitutional debt brake sat uneasily with SPD and Green ambitions for climate and infrastructure investment. A 2023 constitutional court ruling that blocked a budgetary workaround made the tension impossible to paper over further.
What turned a policy disagreement into a full collapse was the discovery, after the fact, that the FDP leadership had been preparing an exit strategy for weeks — using explicitly militaristic campaign language in an internal document — rather than negotiating in good faith to the end. Eighteen months of public coalition infighting before the collapse had already convinced many voters that mainstream parties could not govern competently together; the confirmation that one partner had been sabotaging the coalition on purpose deepened that impression considerably.