If chutzpah could turn into votes, Schröder would have romped to victory, writes Derek Scally
Germany's snap election was supposed to provide clarity on whether or not voters wanted further economic and social reforms.
A week after the voters spoke, everyone is still trying to decipher what they said. What should have been the shortest election campaign on record is now gearing up to be one of the longest, as the battle for the Bundestag enters a new phase.
The Social Democrat (SPD) camp is euphoric at Gerhard Schröder's last-minute turnaround.
"There are many people in the SPD who are now certain that Gerhard Schröder can even walk on water. I confess freely and openly to belonging to that group," said Sigmar Gabriel, a senior SDP man and, like Schröder, a former state premier of Lower Saxony.
Meanwhile, in the Christian Democrat (CDU) camp, there is clearly unhappiness with the performance of party leader Angela Merkel.
Only one percentage point and three Bundestag seats separate the CDU from the SPD. Dr Merkel ended the election ahead, but her party is seething with resentment. Chancellor Schröder ended the election behind, but with a cheering party behind him.
If chutzpah could be converted to votes, Schröder would have romped home. He ignored the premature political obituaries and got out on the campaign trail, raising party support from 26 to 35 per cent in eight solid weeks of campaigning.
One chancellery adviser to Schröder admitted this week that the entire team was exhausted long before the end, but watched in awe as Schröder powered on to a result that is a testament to his powers of self-belief.
"If you don't believe yourself that you can reach the optimal, then you'll never achieve it," Schröder told Die Zeit.
Even after the result that ousted his government, when he was dubbed the "laughing loser", Schröder decided to rise above reality and brush up on his Machiavelli.
In The Prince, Machiavelli writes that the person who masters "virtu" can better exploit "fortuna", the lucky accident. Opportunities must be seized through skill with "lucky shrewdness".
That goes a long way to explaining how Schröder ploughed through this week with unflagging energy and a wolf-like grin. Perhaps he took another tip from that latter-day Machiavelli, Clintonite James Carville, whose first tip for power is: "Don't give up. Never give up."
Voters dealt Schröder a difficult hand on Sunday, but the chancellor is now playing double or nothing, according to German poker champion Horst Koch.
"Personally I find Schröder to be a brilliant poker player," said Mr Koch on national radio. "I would guess that he has an ace up his sleeve."
That ace may be the common interests of Schröder and the SPD. His claim on power is unquestioned by party rank and file who this week are feeling a mixture of respect and thanks, as well as guilt for ever doubting him.
SPD leader Franz Müntefering can only hope that this walk-on-water wonder outlasts the loyalty of the CDU to Merkel when grand coalition discussions inevitably turn to the personality question.
Germany has experienced a grand coalition before, from 1966-69, and Schröder's recent reforms were, by necessity, the work of a de facto grand coalition thanks to the CDU's majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat. Now the talks are about getting the upper hand.
SPD insiders say their negotiating strategy with the CDU is: get rid of Merkel and we'll talk.
But CDU leaders have moved quickly to neutralise any open criticism of Merkel for fear of weakening their hand. Barbed comments have still trickled out, such as Bavarian leader Edmund Stoiber's attack on Merkel's "cool, heartless language" and her emotionless "physicist's view" of the German electorate.
Stoiber has distanced himself from the remarks, but his spokesman Markus Söder has conceded that the CDU lost the election by concentrating on economic issues - emphasising what critics call an overly neo-liberal slant - without a nod to its traditional values and social teachings.
The election results made clear that floating voters looking for social balance went left to the SPD, while traditional CDU voters anxious to avoid a grand coalition went to the right and the FDP.
FDP elders like Hans-Dietrich Genscher have warned party leader Guido Westerwelle that he has a moral obligation to these voters to exhaust all other options before allowing a CDU-SPD grand coalition.
Westerwelle has laughed off SPD coalition approaches as "stalking", but his preferred option - a three-way coalition with the CDU and Greens - looks doomed.
Green leaders left talks with the CDU yesterday with no intention of returning, heading to the opposition benches with other things on their mind.
When the Greens lost their Bundestag seats in 1990, Joschka Fischer used the opportunity to resolve the internal power struggle, with the ecological radical fundamentalists, the so-called "Fundis", losing out to his pragmatic "Realo" faction.
Party observers suggest that Mr Fischer's departure from the front bench this week is a deliberate move to encourage the next stage of the Green evolution.
"The Red-Green era is over and Fischer knows that the Greens have to find a new role in the political landscape.
"They have to develop a new programme renewal and independent strength, not just give the impression that they are just a majority-maker for the politics of others," says Ralf Fücks, head of the Green Party-aligned Heinrich Böll Foundation.
"The cultural differences with the CDU are too big this time around, but new combinations will have to come in the future."
Schröder's sensational election comeback has overshadowed the election result of the Left Party alliance of post-communists and former SPD left-wingers. Oskar Lafontaine, the one-time SPD leader turned Left Party leading light, says the party has no illusions of power at the moment despite capturing 10 per cent of the vote to overtake the Greens in its first election outing. Still, his return to politics gave the German left 51 per cent of the vote, deprived Schröder and Merkel of electoral victory, and shook up the political landscape.
"Welcome to the Berlin Republic," remarked Hans-Ulrich Jörges, political correspondent of Stern.
"Some 15 years after German unification, the notoriously delayed nation has reinvented its party system. The old arithmetic of one big party and one small party is history."
As the days drag on, the grand coalition is beginning to look inevitable and the wall-to-wall television coverage has already given the Berlin coalition negotiations a certain Big Brother feel.
Soon, everyone in Germany will be crowing for Gerd and Angie to get it on, or be voted out.