Gerhard Schröder had a good night last Sunday. For any other politician it would have been a disaster, but Schröder beamed like a boy. His party, the SPD, had nabbed an anemic 34 percent of the German vote; support across the land for two smaller parties had jumped in protest against the status quo; Schröder was (probably) on his way out as chancellor, and the political classes were headed for weeks of confusion after a snap election he had called himself. Looking for "clarity," he'd delivered his nation into the fog. Embarrassing, right? But there was one thing for Schröder to celebrate, and he was giddy with it on television just after the polls closed: Angela Merkel hadn't won. Of course, strictly speaking she hadn't exactly lost either. But just weeks before the election pundits and pollsters were still expecting her to wipe the floor with Schröder. Schadenfreude over her failure to do so affected the chancellor like cocaine.

In fact he was so high on life during the election night debate, that FDP liberal party leader Guido Westerwelle asked Schröder on live TV if he had been drinking. The chancellor has since officially stated that he hadn't touched a drop, but has admitted that his excitable behavior was slightly irregular.

He was still giddy enough two days later to announce that if he couldn't be chancellor, a grand coalition between the SPD and Merkel's CDU/CSU was out of the question. The implication being that the vibrant, worldly, suave Herr Schröder would certainly not serve under a dowdy "Chancellor Merkel." His party, of course, lacked the seats in parliament to make him chancellor, but his party was also cooking up petty technical ways to deny the CDU/CSU their slight majority -- and Germany, to the world's bemusement, began to resemble Florida in November 2000. But at least it has given the German press a field day.

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes that the chancellor has given Germans a whole new language. "The 'loser' of an election is now known as the 'winner,' as long as he's a Social Democrat, had expected to do much worse, and is named Schröder." The editors go on to trash Schröder's main tactic for clinging to power, which would involve dissolving a traditional rule allowing Merkel's CDU to sit as a single parliamentary party with its Bavarian counterpart, the CSU. "The methods Schröder and some of his cronies have resorted to are not just dishonest but frivolous."

The conservative Die Welt reminds readers that undemocratic fiddling with the parliamentary process was responsible for destabilizing the Weimar Republic. The paper wonders if Gerhard Schröder can be taken seriously after his giddy performance in front of the cameras on Sunday. "German politics seem to have developed a dangerous recklessness or at best a naïve wish to experiment," writes the paper. "Evidently some politicians, above all the chancellor, have succumbed to the illusion that Germany, as a result of its postwar history, is inherently stable."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung looks at Schröder's chumminess with Russian President Vladimir Putin and wonders if some of Putin's autocratic methods haven't rubbed off. Not only has Schröder not objected to the ugliest stains on Putin's record - the war in Chechnya, the strangling of free press - he seems to be "Putinizing" Germany. "The chancellor seems to be increasingly unmasking himself as Putin's brother in spirit," writes the paper dramatically, "with little respect for democratic rules and institutions."

Other papers don't knock Schröder himself but rather the whole circus of coalition-building, which has been an orgy of glad-handing and bizarre speculation. According to the left-leaning Tageszeitung "there would be no great crisis without the show of vanities which the public has uncomfortably watched for days. There would just be the simple duty to take the vote seriously," writes the paper. "A majority of Germans aren't against changing the welfare state, and they also don't want to see it reformed away ... This means that there are various sensible coalitions which can govern, as long as ambition, hurt feelings, prejudice, lust for revenge, or a startling amount of stubbornness don't warp the process."

Some newspapers, however, have noticed that Schröder is changing his tune. His people are talking to Angela's people, meaning the two major parties have held their first serious conversation -- and the news pages of the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung as well the business daily Handelsblatt are whiffing a grand coalition. "With the first meeting between the SPD and CDU/CSU," writes Handelsblatt, common sense and realism have arrived in Berlin ... A grand coalition does not appear as unlikely as it did on election night. They do not have to love each other. A marriage of convenience is always better in politics."