You could be forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland had left its days of organized violence behind. The last few years have been relatively quiet, even encouraging: the peace process seemed to be making strides. Cranes hovering over Belfast's skyline were evidence that reconstruction money was flowing to the area. What's more, the Catholic Irish-nationalist movement's political wing, Sinn Fein, had recently gotten a decisive leg-up on the movement's military division, by convincing the IRA to agree to a ceasefire. But the IRA still hasn't given up its weapons and this week's eruption of violence underscores tensions caused by the fact that many of Northern Ireland's Protestants feel the IRA and Catholics have disproportionately gained from the peace process.

The mayhem that broke out in Belfast has left behind a disturbing amount of destruction, a surfeit of unsettling images, 60 injured policemen and massive social unease. Few deny that Loyalist Protestants were responsible for the weekend's violence: the rioting erupted on Saturday when Northern Ireland's main legal Protestant fraternity, the Orange Order, called for Protestants to mount sit-down protests on roads all over Belfast in response to British authorities' refusal to allow an Orange parade from passing along a main road on the Catholic side of town. Before long, the ostensibly peaceful protest had transformed into a hailstorm of automatic gunfire and Molotov cocktails.

But the outburst has people scanning all the parties and wondering where the next violent eruption will come from. Was this a one-off series of riots to let off steam, or is Northern Ireland throttling back to a past era of instability and violence? Among those posing the questions are German commentators, who also don't shy away from pointing a finger or two.

The reliably leftist editors at Die Tageszeitung throw their readers a bit of a curveball: the governments of Great Britain and Ireland are to blame for the rioting, though not, say the paper's editors, because they've colluded to oppress Northern Ireland's Protestants. Instead, the paper argues it is because they failed to crack down quickly enough on the Protestants' paramilitary operations. "The governments in London and Dublin earn much of the responsibility for the situation, because they haven't learned anything from the last 35 years" the paper opines. "Every time an attempted solution has involved sharing power with Catholics, Protestant organizations have responded with violence." Great Britain also deserves blame for focusing on the IRA at the expense of a balance of power between the factions. For any substantial peace to be reached, the editors continue, the British government will have to remove its blinders and demand from the Protestants just what they've required of the Catholics: namely, the giving up of their weapons.

Over at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they're not so quick to pass the buck. In a short, no-nonsense editorial, the paper refuses to mince words: "Protestant Unionist 'leadership' figures have given Protestant-Loyalist criminals the pretext for well-prepared attacks on the police and military and, in addition, blamed those who have been attacked for the outbreak of violence." The riots were inexcusable tantrums of an immature populace, write the editors, who give a final swift judgement: 'The Unionists may be bitter about the fact that the wind of change is blowing in their face," it concludes, "but this is no excuse for joining forces with murderers."

In its editorial, the center-left Suddeutsche Zeitung begins with a rehashing of conventional wisdom -- that "the Protestants are the unsympathetic oppressors, the Catholics the oppressed innocents" -- before going on to dismantle that theory. The Protestants' fears of being sold down the river by their own government aren't groundless, the paper writes. "They accuse London of making too many concessions to the IRA." The paper alleges that "Tony Blair is primarily interested in solving the complex problem once and for all, thus ensuring his place in the history books, and less interested in the consequences for those people directly affected." The editors refer to this as the 'British Compromise', by which they mean London's historical tendency to extricate itself from tricky international situations with the goal of saving face rather than that of tying up loose ends. The editorial warns that the rest of the world has repeatedly been left to "struggle with the consequences [of the British Compromise] to this day -- in Palestine, Cyprus, or the Indian-Pakistani conflict. And soon perhaps in Northern Ireland."

The other issue dominating editorial pages is the final debate of major party leaders on Monday night in the run-up to Sunday's election in Germany. The debate, televised by German public broadcaster ARD, brought together incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, his competitor Angela Merkel, and the leading candidates of all the country's major political parties. The 90-minute fast-thinking duel will be the last before German voters head to the polls this weekend.

Of course, each party is claiming victory. A top Social Democrat said you could see a "class difference" between Schröder and Merkel, "Nobody is going to turn the future of this country over to common sailors." And a CDU leader countered: "The Social Democrats and Greens stand for the past and the Christian Democrats for the future."

In SPIEGEL ONLINE's own editorial, Claus Christian Malzahn bashes Merkel and Schröder for not broaching the real issue of the week: the increasing likelihood that the election will put the left-leaning Social Democrats in bed with the right-leaning Christian Democrats, leading a coalition government. "One of the key sentences of the evening," writes Malzahn, was, "'There won't be a grand coalition!' as Angela Merkel said at the close of the broadcast. Roughly translated from her doublespeak: The probability that the government will be formed by a grand coalition has never been as high in the past 40 years." Everyone participating in the debate understood this doublespeak -- because the more the SPD catches up, the more likely it is that the Christian Democrats will have to govern with the Social Democrats. "But right now nobody wants to deal with this prospect." Schröder avoids the issue because it would force him to admit that his political career is over. Angela Merkel dodges it because she knows that as chancellor, a grand coalition would squish her in politically between the SPD and a phalanx of CDU state presidents who often serve as her political detractors, including Edmund Stoiber, who heads the CDU's Bavarian sister party. It would be the equivalent of getting stuck in a cramped hotel elevator with people you'd rather not be with.

The conservative Die Welt laments that Schröder still hasn't given concrete answers on how he's going to fix the country's "disastrous" job market and bring about an upswing. "Again and again," the paper writes, "Schröder gave his gloomy warning of cuts in social welfare under a CDU/CSU/FDP (Free Democratic Party) government." But Merkel, it argues, was the only politician present who dared to "speak about the issues at stake" on Sunday. No one will be able to say that she comfortably covered up her plans."

The financial daily Handelsblatt writes that the second TV debate changed nothing substantial, even though Schröder seems to have won. The editors believe Merkel and Schröder talked past each other. "Voters basically see a double campaign whenever Merkel and Schröder meet," writes the paper. "Merkel, on the one hand, tries to score points with her platform. Schröder, on the other, courts voters with his personality. And TV always favors personality ... The chancellor's media strength is still so great that it lets undecided voters forget one decisive point: Schröder is pulling up the SPD in the polls even though he himself will likely have no role to play after September 18th."