Germany's last weekend before the verdict

The final weekend of the German campaign closed with the polls showing a result that had been stable for weeks, and the candidates, in the rallies and the televised debates that the weekend brought, campaigned as if the stability could still be broken. The election on Sunday will produce a result that the polls have predicted with unusual confidence, and the confidence is the irony of the campaign’s final days: the outcome that everyone expects is the outcome that nobody can yet describe, because the German system decides the government in the negotiations after the vote rather than in the vote itself. The first place will be known on Sunday; the government will be known, in the country’s tradition, weeks later.

The polling arithmetic of the campaign’s end is the part that the commentators have been rehearsing for months. The conservative bloc has led throughout, the governing parties have trailed with the particular slump that incumbents in hard times experience, and the smaller parties have occupied the space between the blocs that the election’s arithmetic will have to fill. The projections give the conservative leader the chancellorship that the polls have promised, and the projections give the country something rarer: a range of plausible coalitions that the traditional partnerships have not prepared the public to imagine. The Sunday result will settle the first question, the distribution of the seats, and the distribution will settle the second question, the composition of the government, through the negotiations that the country’s politics are famous for conducting at a pace that its industries would not tolerate.

The campaign’s substance has been the economy, and the economy’s substance has been the adjustment that the country has been avoiding. The debates have circled the manufacturing decline, the energy prices, the welfare state, the debt rules, and the parties have offered the competing programmes for the adjustment with the particular German combination of the technical and the ideological; the voters, the polls report, are choosing less on the programmes than on the competence, the credibility, the management of the country through the winter of its economic discontent. The choice is the pragmatic one that the country’s politics usually reward, and the reward, the analysts note, will be the mandate to govern the adjustment rather than the mandate to avoid it.

The election’s international dimension is the part that the campaigns have handled with the restraint that the national debates require. The war in Europe, the American redefinition of the alliance, the European defence, all of it was present in the background of the campaign and absent from its foreground, with the parties saving the international questions for the period after the vote; the restraint reflects the calculation that the voters are deciding on the domestic management, and the calculation is likely correct. The next government will inherit the international questions regardless of the campaign’s emphasis, and the questions will be among the first that the new chancellor will face.

The final weekend’s rallies carried the particular energy that last rallies carry, the crowds, the music, the rehearsed exits, and the energy was the campaign’s last performance of itself. The polls will hold or shift by a point, the turnout will be counted and dissected, and the Sunday evening projections will give the country its first picture of the new parliament; the picture will be followed by the weeks of negotiation that the German system schedules after its elections, and the weeks will produce the government that the country will live with for four years. The weekend before the verdict was the last moment when the outcome was still, formally, in the hands of the voters; on Monday, the outcome will begin to be built by the negotiations that the Sunday result makes possible.