The supposedly consensual and orderly Germans are fighting one another as hard after the election as before it. In a numerical stalemate, each of the two major parties claims the chancellorship and the right to lead a new coalition. And the nearly 78 percent of the citizenry who voted disregarded journalists, pollsters, professors and the elites, above all from business, who instructed them to abandon the welfare state and return to subordination to the United States. Fifty-two percent of the electorate voted for the opposite.

The German left is represented by three parties. The Social Democrats, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in a brilliant comeback from an uninterrupted series of losses in state elections, got 34 percent of the vote--down four points from 2002, but they began the campaign at 26 percent in the polls. The Greens maintained their 8 percent while the new Left Party, made up of Social Democratic dissidents in the west and former Communists in the east, won nearly 9 percent. Together they would have a majority of 327 seats (out of 613).

On the right, the Christian Democratic Union and its ally, the Christian Social Union, went down 3.5 points, to 35 percent. Their leader, the eastern German Angela Merkel, had good reason to look crushed in her TV appearances on election night, since she began the campaign at nearly 50 percent in the polls. The Free Democrats, a market party of the affluent, got nearly 10 percent, improving its score considerably. Neither the Social Democrats and their Green coalition partner, nor the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats, come close to a majority.

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