As for the other half of the grand coalition: Merkel dominates the scene and yet remains hard to define. Her modest, self-effacing style, instinct for consensus and austere but upbeat moral rectitude make her more appealing than her dour opponent.
However, this has hardly made a significant impact on the generation who may be the decisive voting bloc in this election: the 30-40-year-olds, i.e. the youngest voters who still remember a divided Germany. This reunification generation is sick of a coalition government with colourless compromises, but equally dissatisfied with the alternatives on offer — mainly because they don't identify with their style. In a country like Britain where conservative politics can offer an intellectual as well as an aesthetic challenge to the status quo this may be hard to imagine, but in Germany the Right is still seen as irredeemably philistine and uncool.
Look at that, exclaimed my friend, and pointed at a bright green meadow the size of a football field, right in the centre of the city. In this spot once stood the East German parliament buildings before they were demolished last year, causing many tortured discussions about the face of post-unification Germany. Over the next few years, a museum modelled on the old Prussian royal palace will be erected. Its style is so archaic and its mission so lofty (it is supposed to house exhibitions to "make people think about other cultures") that even Prince Charles would approve. Perhaps it is too simple a metaphor to see this empty space as a symbol of the flatness of German politics in the face of a general election: a pleasant in-between, waiting for something new to be constructed. Still — is it a coincidence that this vacant site should be found in the heart of the new Berlin?
Chancellor Merkel once commented that President Sarkozy behaved like the Sun King. In Germany you have to persuade people, she said. Perhaps she forgot that the first step to persuasion is to develop a theme. What one hopes for from this election is that it finally spurs a debate about what themes Germans want their politicians to bring to the table. What one fears is that it will reveal a mirror image of what lies in the middle of Berlin: a flat empty space, with solitary, languid figures who chose the wrong outfit for the new, supposedly European Germany.
