Germany -- The Expectations Game

Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats won Sunday's elections but by a far smaller margin than was expected. What had widely been predicted to be an overwhelming win turned out to be a narrow three-seat advantage over the second biggest party -- Gerard Schroeder's Social Democrats.

Seeing the narrowness of his loss, Schroeder exultantly declared victory, which led some commentators to wonder what drug he was taking.

Arno Wiedmann writes:

Last night, as the election results were coming in, the candidates of all the major parties appeared on national television for a "Berlin Round". Despite the fact that the SPD were not ahead in the polls, Gerhard Schröder seemed convinced that he had won. His comments, expressions and body language suggested that it would be absurd to interpret the results any other way, which lead FDP candidate Guido Westerwelle to ask Schröder what he had been up to before the broadcast and commentator Arno Widmann to consider whether Schröder might have lost his marbles.
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Gerhard Schröder was in a state of complete mental incapacity. He sat there and claimed he had won the elections, it was his responsibility to form a government. Anyone who claimed anything else was talking down social democracy.
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If he has friends, they should take him to a sanatorium, get him off his high.
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It was also a rush of power. And this made the show doubly awful. It showed that what mattered to Schröder was not the victory, let alone the one or other problem with which Germany is saddled. For Schöder, it's just about eliminating the enemy. He didn't care one bit that he had less votes than Angela Merkel. He was just delighted that she had been unable to achieve her goal.

Read the whole thing here.

OK, it was not Gerry's best performance, but Angie has problems too. The left-wing press has been quick to lable her narrow win a "debacle" and predicts that she will be unable to form a government, leaving the field to Schroeder.

Reuters, for instance, reports:

BERLIN (Reuters) - German conservative leader Angela Merkel will be fighting for her political life in difficult coalition negotiations in the next few weeks after her party's disastrous showing in Sunday's election.

The crushing disappointment of the result, which saw an apparently invincible opinion poll lead fade to a wafer-thin advantage of three seats in parliament over the next biggest party -- and no governing majority -- has badly weakened her.

If she cannot form a stable coalition with either Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats -- an option Schroeder has ruled out unless he heads it -- or the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), her future will be bleak.

"If Schroeder is blocking her chancellorship -- as he appears to be -- then it's not looking good for Mrs Merkel," said Dietmar Herz, a political scientist at Erfurt University.

Read it here.

Disastrous? Crushing disappointment? She WON guys! In the US we call this the "expectations game." The media sets impossibly high standards for a candidate and when [s]he fails to meet them [s]he is declared a loser even if [s]he wins. This insidious predictions game has derailed many a candidacy and going into elections American politicians work hard to "lower expectations" by talking up their opponents and minimizing their own popularity. Apparently Ms. Merkel's handlers have not learned how to do this yet.

Now the brokering begins. Somebody is going to have to coalesce with somebody else. Perhaps Schroeder's bizarre behavior is just a negotiating stance and not, as some fear, evidence that he has lost contact with reality or sheer maliciousness. Let us hope so.