Dr. Klaus Dieter Frankenberger is the foreign editor of the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" newspaper.

I haven’t experienced this in all of my adult life. I can’t remember anything that close that a slim majority is going from one side to the other or now as we have an absolute stalemate.

It was so close because there were a lot of different cross-cutting pressures applying to this election. On the one hand people are fed up with the governing coalition, certainly with the Social Democrats. Others are pretty satisfied with the performance of the Greens or certainly with the foreign minister who is the most popular politician in the country. Then we have the rise of the main opposition parties. And we have the almost devastating performance of the liberals (Free Democrats), who had a very high ambition to get 18 percent of the vote. Now they are landing roughly 7.5 percent due to intra-party fighting.

And, of course, there has been a lot of voter volatility throughout this year. Every other day there’s a new issue. Last week we had an issue on the transatlantic relationship, then at the end of this week unemployment came to the forefront again. Then, literally hours before the opening of the polls, we had this new crisis on what the justice minister allegedly said vis-a-vis President Bush. So there’s an awful lot of insecurity and volatility, which is indicative of the lack of social coherence, which is indicative of the instability of the general outline of where this country is headed.

The fundamental thing the opposition party tried to hammer through is the dismal economic record of the past four years. The Schröder government started out saying they would reduce unemployment and that if they wouldn’t reduce it to less than 3.5 million then they should not be reelected. And now we are above 4 million. Unemployment is the core issue that the opposition candidates hammered away. They tried to sink it into the voters’ mind that this is pivotal for restructuring the country and bringing it back into the mainstream of economic performance in Europe and beyond.

In the end, there will likely be a very slim majority for the present governing coalition, which then puts a great, great question mark behind the stability of the new government, a question mark behind this enormous task of reforming and restructuring the economy of the key country in Europe. What all the pundits have said, and I think they are right, is that this country needs a very fundamental and substantial push forward, a push in the direction of reform. The fact that this majority will be so slim -- probably depending on a few, one or two members -- in the Bundestag to hammer through a substantial reform package poses one of the most fundamental challenges for this chancellor or any other.

Dr. Jackson Janes is the executive director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

I think it is very similar to the States in our elections in 2000, Bush and Gore. In other words, I think the country is split on a number of issues -- probably less so on Iraq -- but more on the issue of what the German economy needs to have done to get it over the doldrums that it’s in.

And I think there’s just basically a block now on both sides of the aisle. Some are saying we need some change, but how much and maybe not as much as we’d like, and on the other hand, there are people who are saying no we are fine where we are. So I think what we’ve got here is a country that is at odds with itself on what it needs to do and how it needs to get there.

Well I think what will happen, is that the chancellor -- if it’s Schröder -- will have heard the message -- that there is something people are concerned about, namely in dealing with the enormous levels of unemployment that are there, the fact that the country hasn’t been able to get its economic engine started for a while, the necessity to improve its education system. There are a number of questions that are hanging out there that the chancellor will have to address because he’s heard that there is someone out there by the name of Edmund Stoiber who was addressing those questions and a lot of people like what they heard. So he’s going to have to figure out what he can do to get his domestic agenda together so he can meet those questions and meet those demands.

In the end the Iraq question is still on the table. What it is that Germany is willing and able and not willing and able to do if there is some military action in that part of the world. I don’t think the issue is going away. I think it has to be faced. For the most part the majority of public opinion says we don’t think this is a particularly good idea. That’s something that perhaps in the U.S. should be seen as a sovereign right to say we think there’s another way to go on this issue. But despite the fact there are reservations, there’s still going to be a necessity for Germany to take a stance that says we don’t like that particular option but we want to get engaged and figure out what else can be done to solve the danger that’s there on which we all agree. And I think that’s something that’s going to be a challenge for the foreign minister and the chancellor.

NEXT PAGE: "We've never had this kind of cliffhanger before"

Dr. Peter Lösche is a political science professor at the University of Göttingen.

We never ever had in our electoral history that kind of a cliffhanger election. When you go back to ‘76 at that time it was very close. But still the coalition government of Willy Brandt was ahead by 2 percentage points over the opposition party Christian Democrats and Helmut Kohl at that time. So it’s really a premier and it’s facinating.

If and when you want to change policies, if and when you want to reform, even cut into, the welfare state in Germany you need more votes than the opposition has. And it works because party parliamentary group discpline and party discipline will be enforced, because there is only one vote for a majority.

If and when there is no majority for black and yellow or for red and green because there are two members of the former communist party PDS in parliament, then you have to form a grand coalition of SPD and Union, if you want to have a majority.

We have had one once before from ‘66 to ‘69 and it was very successful. Many reforms were brought about, and if and when you form a grand coalition today you have to negotiate and agree on what kind of reforms you want to bring about. You have to agree on a schedule and you have to agree that after four years it will be over. That, in poiltical reality, means that after two years the campaign starts again. But the first two years might bring about very fundamental and in Germany very necessary reforms.

Count Carl Hohenthal is the editor in chief of the newspaper "Die Welt."

If we come back to the programs for a short moment we must say that the Union talked a lot about economy and unemployment but the program they offered wasn’t really very clean. Let me come to the liberal Free Democratic Party for a short moment The liberals are the losers for serveral reasons. But if you look at the programs, the liberals had the most modern program, one can say.

They really offered certain reforms and they lost. So that shows me that the people in Germany are not really interested in strong, long term reforms and I suppose that the parties see this as I do and will not be very keen to really starting changing things in this country, so I must say I’m not very optimistic.

The former communist Party of Democratic Socialism (which failed to get enough votes to have group representation in parliament) is a special case because the PDS is the party of East Germany and their losing shows to me that finally East Germany is becoming – if you want - a normal country. So far, the PDS has been the party of the frustrated losers of the GDR and slowly, it seems that the East is arriving in the West.

It seems to me that as far as federal politics are concerned their time is simply over. If you look at state politics in east Germany, like in Mecklenberg Vorpommen – where there was another election today – there the PDS is still strong, so I think that in the future we will still hear from them. But in the Bundestag – in federal politics -- they are losing ground and we will never hear from them again.

Chris Emsden is the managing editor "Italy Daily," the English-language edition of "Corriere Della Stella."

Italians watched the German elections with interest, and drew largely partisan conclusions from its result. Aides to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi drew solace from hinting that the
left's triumph in Berlin would assure Rome faced little competition in trying to become the United States' chief ally on the continent.

Senior figures in the opposition center-left coalition rejoiced at what they saw was the end of a right-leaning trend across Europe. But they split on a more detailed analysis, as moderates cited Gerhard Schröder's modest reform agenda as electorally convincing, while left-wingers pointed to the tactical success of the German left's use of anti-war rhetoric.

The pacifist line was key to the result, according to Fausto Bertinotti, leader of Italy's Refounded Communist Party. He was backed by the Greens, a tiny force in Italy, whose leader, Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, called the German vote a clarion call for European progressives to take up "bolder" stances on peace, environmental issues and human rights issues linked to immigration.

Stung by its defeat last year, the center-left coalition has broken into two factions, with a powerful minority calling for a vocal defense of existing employment legislation and welfare benefits over a moderate reform agenda.

Coalition logic is important in Italy, due both to a fragmented political scene and an electoral law in which proportional representation has a significant quota. As a result, the evident success of Joschka Fischer's Greens was seen as encouraging for the prospects of Italian radicals such as CGIL union leader Sergio Cofferati and film-maker Nanni Moretti, each of whom have spearheaded a string of rallies and strikes against Berlusconi's business-friendly government.

But Giuliano Urbani, the culture minister in the conservative cabinet, said the closeness of the vote would oblige a second Schröder government to hew to a moderate agenda.