Germany cast adrift in choppy seas

Angela Merkel

PARIS - Germany has been plunged into what may prove to be its worst political crisis since its founding as a democratic republic in 1949 - and Europe will be part of the collateral damage.

After elections last Sunday produced volumes of bile but no outright winner, the leaders of the two main parties have embarked on horse-trading in rival attempts to craft a coalition government.

But the task is complicated by their deep animosity and Germany's raw inexperience in tackling a deadlock of this kind. All the likely outcomes point to a country whose government will be hobbled for months.

Germany has voted for the perfect stalemate, the greatest possible self-obstruction, total paralysis, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung lamented.

Of the 613 seats in the lower house of Parliament, 222 went to Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party (SDP), and 225 to the conservative opposition, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CSU), led by Angela Merkel.

Of the rest, 51 went to the SDP's usual coalition partner, the Greens, and 61 to the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a pro-business group that traditionally partners the conservatives in government.

The other 54 went to a radical leftwing bloc shunned by the other parties, for its biggest component is the once-ruling East German Communist Party.

Schroeder and Merkel each need both the Greens and FDP to team up with their parties to command a majority. But to do so, they will have to ease personal dislikes, bridge divergent agendas, dangle ministerial jobs and make other concessions, and it seems an almost impossible business.

The Greens themselves have been thrown into disarray by their patriarch, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who has quit the party's leadership.

Germany has no precedent for resolving a mess such as this.

Its federal constitution, crafted mainly by Britain, has, in fact, done wonderfully well in balancing the power between the central government and the laender (states), avoiding the creation of tiny parties which are a source of parliamentary turbulence.

But the constitution says nothing about who is designated chancellor. By tradition, the President names the head of the biggest single party to form a government. Last week's wafer-thin outcome has thrown that convention into disarray.

Merkel says that as her group has the biggest number of seats, she has the right to form the next government. Schroeder, though, points out that Merkel's group is an alliance of two parties, the CDU and CSU, and says the SPD is the biggest single party which would make him chancellor-designate.

The new Parliament has to meet by October 18. At this first session, President Horst Koehler must nominate a candidate for chancellor, who must secure an absolute majority of at least 307 votes in the Bundestag.

Majority approval may still be possible even in the absence of a formal coalition accord.

If, at the first session, Koehler's candidate for chancellor does not get a majority, two further rounds of voting can take place.

If there is still no majority at the end of the third round, Koehler has the choice of appointing a chancellor at the helm of a minority government or dissolving Parliament and calling new elections, an event that also has no precedent in post-war history.

A popular hypothesis is that Merkel and Schroeder will eventually set aside their hostility and put together a grand coalition of their two parties. But any such alliance would probably be so fragile it could implode at the first sign of stress.

It would certainly seem incapable of pushing through the unpopular reforms needed to right the country's ailing economy.

Meanwhile, the European Union is looking on aghast as its most populous member and paymaster lies adrift. The political paralysis of Europe is deepening, says the Spanish daily El Pais.

Germany partners France as the EU's political motor, with the two countries providing political nous and economic clout to drive the process of European integration.

Without a coherent German government, it is almost impossible to see a breakthrough on the EU's budget problems and controversial ambitions to admit Turkey to the 25-nation bloc.

One casualty of Germany's crisis is the planned European Constitution, which was rejected by French and Dutch voters this year.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU would put the charter on ice, "at least for the next two or three years".