The old Chancellor is a past master in the art of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. In any case, Germans are not exactly thrilled by the alternative on offer. The trouble is that the Social Democrat candidate has not put the real choice between different kinds of society at the heart of his campaign. Societies do not collapse, they split and crack. German society is changing imperceptibly now, as it has in the past.
Police discreetly move beggars on from the smarter shopping areas.
Accordions play outside the grand Jugendstil houses in West Berlin. There are now six million unemployed but German society is still too well off to realise the full extent of the crisis. Even television news programmes compare the rocketing share prices quoted on the stock exchange with the unemployment figures. Sixty-three per cent of the public are apparently convinced that the only way to get rich is by coming into money or obtaining it by fraudulent means and that the government just wants to make the rich richer. But to speak of stability would be to underestimate the significance of the election results in Saxony-Anhalt at the end of April.