On 9 February 2025, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his challenger Friedrich Merz met for a 90-minute television debate on ZDF and Das Erste. The broadcasters’ rules said that speaking time would be measured in the control room. If the time became clearly unequal, the moderators would raise it. In the three-way debate of 2021, Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pointed out that the clock for her rival Olaf Scholz kept running while the moderators were speaking.