Two defeated Christian Democratic state governors, a newly powerful Left Party, the Greens in the role of kingmaker and a weak Social Democratic Party which nevertheless has ambitions to appointing the governor in two of the three states where elections were held Sunday. Indeed, Germany's "Super Sunday" elections don't exactly bode well for Angela Merkel's hopes of forging a governing coalition between her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) after Germany's national election on Sept. 27.
If Sunday's vote showed anything, it was that a "black-yellow" coalition -- as the CDU-FDP alliance is known, after the parties' official colors -- is far from certain on the national level. Even in the eastern state of Saxony, where the CDU got 40 percent of the vote, a coalition government featuring the FDP as junior partner is not certain. Reports that the national election had already been decided appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Anyone in CDU or FDP headquarters in Berlin who had been assuming that a black-yellow government was a done deal will have to have a rethink after the massive wake-up call from the electorate.
Is a bit of emotion finally going to infect German politics? The exploratory and coalition talks that will follow Sunday's election are likely to drag on at least until the national election and beyond -- and are likely to finally lend a livelier pace and perhaps even a few serious issues to the soporific election campaign, which up until now has been dominated by minor scandals involving stolen cars and dinner parties at the Chancellery.
It's true that it sounded like the center-left Social Democratic Party's (SPD) chancellor candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier was whistling in the dark on Sunday when he spoke of a "good evening for the SPD." His party was soundly beaten by the CDU in the western state Saarland, got less than 20 percent of the vote in eastern state Thuringia and barely scraped into the double digits in Saxony. The results mark a historic low point for Germany's Social Democrats. And yet, it's been a long time since Steinmeier looked as cheerful as he did on Sunday evening in SPD headquarters in Berlin.
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