SEND IN THE KRAUTS:

Schröder's Putsch against Reality: The results of the German elections eight days ago are clear: German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's party got 450,000 fewer votes than the political camp supporting his opponent Angela Merkel. But he's still claiming the chancellery for himself. It's a political circus that threatens to make Chancellor Schröder into the lead clown. (Dirk Kurbjuweit , 9/26/05, Der Spiegel)

Schröder has presented himself since the elections as a man with a future, as someone who has scored a last-second goal thus giving himself a shot at overtime. But this is roughly where the sports analogy ends. In soccer, for example, the referee calls overtime when there is a tie. But there was no tie here. Schröder and his Social Democrats lost the election to the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), by almost 450,000 votes. In politics, like in sports, Schröder should have been out of the game, because it's normal procedure in Germany that the chancellor comes from the strongest party -- that the strongest party leads the ensuing governing coalition.

All that, it seems, is irrelevant to Schröder. He has staged the first putsch in German post-war history, a putsch against reality. On the evening of the election, he announced that he had no intention of allowing Angela Merkel to take the helm of a possible grand coalition between his own party and the CDU.

Berlin has been in an uproar ever since. Since the vote, there is reality and there is Schröder's version of reality. And there is also a major effort on the part of the SPD to ensure that reality conforms to Schröder's concept of reality, to restyle Schröder's revolt as an act of statesmanship.

Suddenly the German political stage has turned into a Las Vegas casino, where everyone furiously plays poker by day and watches Siegfried and Roy, the illusionists, put on their act by night. But in Berlin the illusionists' names are Gerhard Schröder and Franz Müntefering, who, it turns out, have shown themselves adept at transforming mice into elephants, poodles into tigers.

It's no small achievement for American foreign policy to have turned Germany from a stage for Wagnerian tragedy into one for opera bouffe.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 26, 2005 10:50 AM