Deutschland

Berlin

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was sober on Sunday night and drunk on Monday morning, and both conditions were entirely justified. When the polling booths closed and the first exit polls were published on German television at 6 p.m. on Sunday, the rival camps were so close that either of them might have ended up with a tiny majority but, as an evening of great confusion and excitement wore on, Mr Schroeder’s conservative opponents seemed to move into the lead, which was what most of the German press reported the next morning. At about 11 o’clock that night I arrived at one of the Social Democrats’ election-night parties and found most of them had already gone home, tramping off into the rain in the dispirited belief that they had been beaten, which in a sense they had, for the final figures show that their vote fell by 2.4 percentage points compared to the last general election in 1998, when they threw Helmut Kohl out of office, while the conservatives under the leadership of Edmund Stoiber regained 3.4