How did it come to this? A few months ago, Angela Merkel was a shoo-in for the Chancellorship. Gerhard Schröder appeared to be on his way to retirement and nobody was shedding any tears.

It would be a gross understatement to say that the Merkel has since lost momentum. After months of complacent campaigning, interspersed with a series of embarrassing blunders on the trail -- including the naming of Paul "flat tax" Kirchhof as her finance expert  -- her Christian Democrats have managed to make a race of it. Merkel is still in the electoral driver's seat, but her car is steadily rolling backwards. And the final week of the campaign finds her desperately flailing around for the parking brake.

Yesterday, Angie finally conceded to fellow CDU higher-ups, and said she was willing to welcome finance guru Friedrich Merz back into the higher echelons of party leadership. "I'm glad to take anyone who's willing to help. Everyone is needed," she said when asked about the possibility of a reunion with Merz.

The decidedly tepid response is not surprising given their history. Several years ago, Merz and Merkel engaged in a nasty, open struggle for party leadership with Merkel eventually emerging victorious and the spurned Merz regressed to the political world's shadows. Were he in fact to join her team, it would be a defeat for Merkel -- and Germany's commentators jump on the issue on Thursday.

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung not surprisingly applauds Merkel for yesterday's announcement. The last few days, the paper says, have reflected very poorly on the CDU's stability. "Where [Merkel's campaign team] should have stood strong and gathered ever more closely around their candidate, they instead ducked for cover." Specifically, they were dodging stinging criticism generated by the selection of Paul Kirchhof as part of the campaign team. It got so bad that members of Merkel's campaign had begun to turn on one another. But, with yesterday's indication that Merz may play a bigger role in a Merkel government than many -- including Merkel -- had thought, the Kirchhof-turmoil can be put to rest, the paper argues. Now, the paper says, the CDU's political platform will take center stage.

The conservative Die Welt takes the undisciplined rank-and-file CDU members to task for bickering with one another and argues that the offering to Merz is more a sign of weakness in Merkel's party than anything else. "Merkel wants to lead, should lead, can lead and will lead. But she is all too often played the fool. She is the candidate for chancellor, but isn't yet accepted by her own party. Of course she is enough of a power politician to handle it. But one wishes for more support." The paper writes that Merkel has handled the crisis well. But ends by taking the CDU to task. "That a party would rather endanger a sure-thing victory than hold together and ocassionally shut their mouths is striking."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung takes a look at the idea, first voiced by Paul Kirchhof, of the two finance experts working in "tandem." The verdict? It ain't gonna work. First of all, the paper writes, tandems hardly ever works. Secondly, Kirchhof is an idealist, while Merz is a pragmatist. And third, there is no realistic way the two of them could share power in the finance ministry. "The only clear thing is this," the paper writes. "Four days before the election, Angela Merkel has no clear candidate for the finance ministry. Nobody really believes in a Finance Minister Paul Kirchhof anymore and she hasn't by any means said she would be willing to go with Friedrich Merz. In the end, it could be that neither of the two will become a minister."

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung really lets its hair down in its first-page editorial. "The CDU has led the most miserable election campaign in German history, piling one debacle onto another." The editors recall that, even in the dog days of their feuding in the late 1990s, Oskar Lafontaine and Gerhard Schröder managed to suck it up, put aside their differences and secure an SPD victory in the 1998 election. With all their pre-election bickering, the CDU has managed to "destroy the hope, that their victory would change something for the better." Indeed, the editors point out that the real chaos will likely be exposed only after the election.

Finally, the Financial Times Deutschland makes what amounts to an all out plea to the CDU to bring back Friedrich Merz. Bye bye Kirchhof. It wouldn't be easy, the paper admits. The poor relationship between Merz and Merkel "could be the subject of a deep psychological study." Nevertheless, the two could come up with a compromise, and anyway, Friedrich Merz is the best the party has. He's good with the press, would be able to run the highly complex finance ministry, and is the best speaker in the CDU. It could also be good for him. "It remains to be seen, however, if Merkel and Merz are level-headed enough for such a pact."

The other major object of editorial punditry is this week's UN summit in New York. While the gathering of world leaders is ostensibly a 60th anniversary celebration, it comes at the tail-end of a diplomatic failure: After months of toil, assembled diplomats barely managed any headway on any of Secretary General Kofi Annan's reform plans. German papers take the opportunity to sound off on the disappointing turn of events.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung spreads the blame around. Human-rights violators are taken to task, as are states that sponsor terrorism. But special attention gets focused on the United States and its controversial new UN ambassador John Bolton. "Certainly, the implosion would not have been so extreme had John Bolton not been the American ambassador," the paper rather oddly posits. "Bolton, with his bag of political-negotiating tricks, managed to destroy the painstaking business of reform." The paper laments the fact that years will pass before the reform effort can be revived. "The poor people of this world -- whom this UN anniversary was supposed to help most -- don't really have the time."