Mr. Merz needed two rounds of voting to become chancellor after a surprising defeat in Parliament hours earlier that threatened to hobble his new government.

Hours after he suffered a historic defeat, Friedrich Merz was elected as German chancellor on Tuesday. The leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had been widely expected to win the vote to become the country's 10th chancellor since World War II.

Friedrich Merz's unprecedented first-round failure in the vote to make him German chancellor on Tuesday gave a boost to the far-right AfD, which just days ago was reeling from being officially labelled an extremist threat to democracy.