Gerhard Schroeder will remain the German Chancellor after Germany's recent elections, but his majority in Parliament has become extremely narrow. His Social Democrats (SPD) got 38.5 percent of the vote, and so did the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) of his rival, Edmund Stoiber. The main reason Schroeder won is that his coalition partner, the Greens, came out slightly ahead of the Free Democrats (FDP), who would otherwise most probably have formed a center-right government with the CDU/CSU.
Heads or tails? It looks as if the German electorate refused to make up its mind and instead simply tossed a coin. As a result, the SPD was weakened and the CDU/CSU strengthened -- and now, nobody knows exactly what most Germans do want. While other EU member states such as Britain, France, Italy and Spain have clear parliamentary majorities, Germany does not. This seems to be symptomatic of the country's state of mind: It is blocked. The election result may have fixed that paralysis for the next parliamentary term, which lasts until 2006.
The election campaign foreshadowed the outcome of the vote. It was about everything, except for Germany's real and pressing problems. Schroeder, who still seemed to be on the losing side in August, desperately tried to avoid the most problematic issues for him, namely, low growth and high unemployment. He finally succeeded in doing so when he chose to campaign on an anti-American platform, declaring that under his chancellorship Germany would not support any use of force against Iraq even if a military campaign were authorized by the U.N.