WORLD VIEW:GERMANY'S SOCIAL Democrats (SPD) have gone far in the last decade, and mostly in the wrong direction. It's almost 10 years since Gerhard Schröder ended the 16-year Kohl era and wiped the floor with the Christian Democrats (CDU) in the 1998 general election.
After a turbulent seven years in office and a second term curtailed by controversial economic reforms, Schröder dragged his party over the line in the 2005 election, finishing a whisker behind Angela Merkel's CDU.
But if the general election due next year were called tomorrow, polls suggest the SPD would finish at least 15 points behind the CDU, handing Chancellor Merkel a second term on a plate.
It's clear the SPD needs to rally the troops for a fightback. But before that can happen, the party faces a minor crisis and Kurt Beck, its luckless leader, faces a no-win situation over whether the SPD should lift its fundamental opposition to sharing power with the ex-communist Left Party
In 1990, the SPD faced a similar question. Then, for pragmatic and historical reasons, they decided against an alliance or welcoming members of the post-communist left into their ranks.
Many SPD members still felt the historical humiliation of 1946 when the old communist party (KPD) bullied SPD members in the Soviet zone of post-war Berlin into a forced marriage, a pact that smothered the SPD for decades.
In 1990, western SPD leaders decided to go it alone in the east, hoping they could appeal to people anxious to vote left but not for the old apparatchiks.
The gamble never paid off and the SPD spent the post-unification years in third place in the east. The strongest player remained the rump communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The SPD and PDS remained enemies in the Bundestag, but were able put their differences aside in several eastern states, notably in Berlin, to form stable, respectable coalition governments.
But everything changed after Gerhard Schröder's unloved economic programme prompted a mass exodus of SPD left-wingers, who viewed the reforms as a betrayal of the party's core values.
They joined forces with the Left Party, a new incarnation of the PDS under the leadership of Oskar Lafontaine, himself a disaffected former SPD leader.
The new party now has about 14 per cent support nationwide. After six months of deadlocked coalition talks, local SPD leaders want to form a minority government with Left Party support.
Everyone in the SPD agrees it will be a watershed, but no one can agree whether it will solve the party's current problems, or create new ones.
SPD members who have worked with the post-communists in eastern states want to shatter the taboo. That would eventually clear the way for a federal SPD-Left-Green government, one that would reflect Germany's existing left-wing majority.
SPD leader Kurt Beck is less enthused. He has expressed concern about the plan, but said the strategy in Hesse is ultimately the decision of the local leaders.
Opponents of the Hesse pact say it would undermine the SPD's credibility next year, sending voters the message that the Schröder-era reforms were just a bad dream, it's business as usual now.
Centre-ground voters, alarmed by the Hesse pact, could desert the SPD en masse for the CDU.
But the SPD's ultimate nightmare scenario by ending the Left taboo is freeing from his bottle the mischievous genie of German politics, Oskar Lafontaine. He served as finance minister under Gerhard Schröder, then walked out in protest at Schröder's plans for liberal economic reforms.
Many in the SPD are afraid that, by agreeing to the Hesse pact, Lafontaine is one step closer to his goal of weakening his old party and forcing it into another loveless marriage on the Left's terms, six decades after the first.
Derek Scally is Berlin Correspondent of The Irish Times.
Paul Gillespie is on leave