toilet economy Follow

THIS was the plan. Germany’s super election year would start slowly. The three parties in the “grand coalition”—the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), plus the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—would spend much of 2009 talking up their economic achievements while probing one another for electoral weakness. Things would warm up with a string of elections in the early summer, simmer when three states vote at the end of August and boil over with the federal election on September 27th. Both the CDU-CSU and the SPD hoped then to win enough seats in the Bundestag to form a ruling coalition without the other.