Germany has a new government! Well, almost. One month after the election, and a week after it became public that Angela Merkel would become the country's next chancellor, a full cabinet has been named in Berlin. This forging of a grand coalition between Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been the slowest government-shaping process in postwar German history, and the results are as hard to read as the election returns in September that gave birth to this muddle.

The big story is still that Angela Merkel will have a tough time governing, since the cabinet is full of half-friends and enemies. Edmund Stoiber, governor of Bavaria and chairman of the CDU's sister party there, the Christian Social Union (CSU), will take a seat as the nation's economics and technology minister. Franz Müntefering, head of the SPD, will serve as Merkel's second-in-command (vice-chancellor), and outgoing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's chief of staff, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will be foreign minister. None of them are exactly Merkel allies. Stoiber even laid down a little friendly fire on Merkel on Monday by insisting that Horst Seehofer should serve as minister for agriculture and consumer affairs. Seehofer is a conservative CSU rival of Merkel's who can probably be counted on to resist her efforts to streamline the German economy. Some people don't even think he's conservative. "With Horst Seehofer, the SPD no longer has eight, but nine ministers," said Guido Westerwelle, chairman of the opposition, business-friendly Free Democratic Party.

German papers all see the potential for a classic logjam in Berlin for the next four years. Indeed, the last time a grand coalition ruled the Federal Republic, in the late 1960s, very little got done. But most of the papers still find reasons to be upbeat. The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung notes that Merkel "has named people we don't know, whose actions in office we can't predict. That's good. This lack of experience -- in a best-case scenario -- may also mean a lack of rigidity." But the editors go on to predict personality clashes within the cabinet that might stand in the way of reform.

The right-leaning daily Die Welt thinks the cabinet seems, at first glance, "pragmatic, non-ideological, maybe a little dull, but with very few ego-shooters … It may be that Horst Seehofer is the ninth Social Democrat at the table, and that Stoiber and Müntefering will form an axis of evil to stand in the way of any subsidies being cut." But the government has no choice but to overhaul the German economy and bring hope to the nation's 5 million unemployed. "In Angela Merkel, the Federal Republic has a true economic liberal at the head of government for the first time in its history," who can change public notions of, for example, the necessity of coal subsidies.

"For the first time since reunification there is now a serious chance that Germany can lift itself free of its debts," writes the financial daily Handelsblatt. "Both sides of the coalition agree that scrubbing the national coffers" should be at the top of the agenda. Peer Steinbrück, the finance minister designate, is in a better position now than his predecessor in 2002, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder "found savings ideas from his treasurer nothing but burdensome." But the paper believes that economic problems are now too massive to ignore, and the editors go on to lecture the SPD and CDU/CSU that they should serve the needs of their country before the demands of factions within their parties.