The German election. Schröder agonises

The chancellor may have his election, but not with the result he wanted

ELECTION fever is gripping Germany, even though Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's plan for an early poll on September 18th could yet fail. One hurdle was cleared on July 21st when Horst Kohler, the federal president, decided to support Mr Schroder's request, after he had engineered a lost confidence vote, to dissolve the Bundestag, or lower house. But two Bundestag members have filed suit with the Constitutional Court, which will now deliberate on whether to stop the election.

Early elections can be held in Germany only if a chancellor shows that lack of steady support in the Bundestag stops him governing. After 20 days of agonising, Mr Kohler concluded that Mr Schroder had done that. But the president's arguments left constitutional lawyers scratching their heads. “Our future and that of our children is at stake,” Mr Kohler said in his televised statement. He spoke of millions of unemployed, critical national and regional budget deficits and an outmoded federal structure. “We're having too few children and we're getting older,” he added.

These arguments are somewhat too wide, says Ernst Gottfried Mahrenholz, a law professor in Karlsruhe. He thinks the president should have stuck to the narrow question of whether Mr Schroder's claim that he could no longer govern was “plausible”. That was the issue in 1983, the last occasion when parliament was dissolved early. Then a panel of eight judges, one of whom was Mr Mahrenholz, grudgingly supported an opportunistic election called by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but implied that things would have to be done more convincingly next time. They have not been, say Jelena Hoffman and Werner Schulz, two Bundestag members.

Udo di Fabio, a judge at the Constitutional Court, will now examine their objections. In about 14 days' time, there will be oral hearings. The court will then deliberate for a couple of weeks before making its decision, probably at the end of August, predicts Mr Mahrenholz, who recalls that the 1983 proceedings took four-and-a-half weeks in all. Yet few pundits expect the court to force a postponement of the election. Indeed, some hope that it will instead recommend a change in the constitution so that the Bundestag can dissolve itself in future without such a fuss.

Out on the hustings, Mr Schroder does not appear to have got quite the campaign he hoped for. The opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) mobilised more quickly than he had expected behind Angela Merkel, their candidate for chancellor. A new Left Party, uniting the PDS, successor to the East German communists, and WASG, a movement of discontented trade unionists, is doing well in the polls. Spice is added by the presence at its head of two political showmen: Gregor Gysi, the former PDS leader, and Oskar Lafontaine, a one-time SPD chairman and (briefly) Mr Schroder's first finance minister. The latest opinion polls give the Left Party 12% nationwide, and an impressive 32% in the east, where it could conceivably come first. These figures suggest that it is stealing votes from the SPD in the west and the CDU in the east - somewhat galling for the CDU, since Ms Merkel comes from the east.

Calculations about who might form a coalition with whom have become muddy. Even the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), masters of many previous coalitions of right and left, could end up on the shelf. That would be a pity, since their programme has the boldest proposals for tackling Germany's structural and economic problems: cutting corporate tax, simplifying income tax, easing labour and environmental laws, and charging fees for higher education. Cynics say that the FDP can afford to propose such tough policies only because it will not be called upon to implement them.