I think it's important to us, and so I'll continue to try to make some sense out of the recent German election.

But it's obviously not going to be easy, as The Captain points out:

Angela Merkel may not be the only casualty of the latest round of German elections. German journalists and pollsters who proclaimed the inevitability of her win at the expense of Gerhard Schroeder now wonder how they missed the story so badly:

This was the election outcome no one expected. Not the CDU's politicians, not the pollsters and not the journalists. At shortly before 6 p.m. local time, the representatives of the various media got together on the second floor of CDU headquarters in Berlin's Adenauer building.

Here, the party set up a buffet for guests in one of its conference rooms, but by early evening, most had lost their appetites. Already, everyone was predicting that the black and yellow (CDU and the liberal Free Democratic Party, or FDP) coalition would fail to capture a majority. Some were already predicting that the CDU would only garner 35 percent of the vote. "If that happens," said a journalist for a daily newspaper, "both we and the pollsters might as well call it a day." A fellow journalist suggested that everyone take off on a six-week vacation and "just get the DPA (German Press Agency) printouts." Everyone was stunned by this election campaign, which ended up producing the most unexpected of results.

It seems that the American media does not find itself alone in losing touch with its readership, although this disconnect seems exceedingly strange. In this case, the press overestimated the impact that Merkel's pro-American economics and politics would have on German voters. That seems odd, given the nanny-state expectations that kept Schroeder from implementing any kind of meaningful economic reforms over the past two years or so, but that apparently accounted for the sudden shift in support over the two weeks prior to the election.

Now they have no idea what to report.

And I have no idea what to believe, either.

I may have to turn to the 'sphere, or more likely, let it come to me, to tell me more, reliably, about the fall-out, now and later, from this election.

Which seems to have decided . . .

Nothing.

Update:

And come to me it has, in the form of this from Austin Bay Blog, at least to confirm for me the conclusion that nothing has been decided:

John Fund essays Germany's split vote.

He has it exactly right, in just about two paragraphs:

The muddled result, with neither major party able to form a stable parliamentary majority, means that Germany will not be taking decisive action anytime soon to reform its unwieldy welfare state, which has helped bring it 11% unemployment and zero economic growth That will not be good for the world. Germany, the third-largest economy in the world, represents 30% of the output of the European Union. The "sick man of Europe" is likely to remain bedridden for a while longer.

Most voters and nearly all of the business community wanted a decisive result. Instead the peculiarities of Germany's parliamentary system delivered a complete mess with the most likely government an unwieldy "grand coalition" of the conservative Christian Democrats and the left-wing Social Democrats. Yoking two such bitter rivals together will likely lead to gridlock, confrontation and ultimately new elections within two years�.

The grand coalition would be a pushme-pullyou contraption. That won't cut it. Germany needed a clear political decision in order to implement reforms. As Fund says, the best bet is a new vote inside two years.

Yet.

Further Update:

As usual, Varifrank comes through:

If it was a snake it wouldda bit me!

I've figured out the best solution to Germanys Election Problem!

Its so obvious I dont know why no one else thought of it!

Have Schroeder and the SPD run the East side of Germany and Merkel and the CDU run the West side of Germany. Give each 2 years to improve their part of Germany, and the one with the lower unemployment rate wins!

You know, sometimes I amaze even myself.

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