To sum up: Angela Merkel did poorly, but still might be chancellor. Gerhard Schröder did well, but may be out of a job. And the two small parties with clear victories may not have any role in the government at all. The only clear message is that Germans have weighed in heavily against the major parties -- Merkel's center-right CDU and Schröder's center-left SPD -- to the benefit of the (much smaller) Left Party and business-friendly Free Democratic Party.

This leaves plenty of room for tea-leaf reading, and German newspapers have busied themselves with interpreting the polls and suggesting coalitions. Are voters sick of economic reform? In favor of it? Do they want a brisker economy or a stronger welfare state? Gerhard Schröder called this snap election in the first place to gain a mandate for his Clinton-style welfare overhaul, which critics from the right have labelled insufficient and the growing masses of unemployed seem to loathe.

The backlash from the left and the unemployed led to a new party formed this summer by an SPD malcontent and former friend of Schröder's, Oskar Lafontaine, along with a former Communist, Gregor Gysi. The new Left Party is either a breakaway faction of the SPD or a grassroots post-Communist expression of discontent in the former east. Either way, it took votes from Schröder, and the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung thinks Germans have spoken loud and clear for a new red-red-green coalition. Schröder "wanted clarity, and he got it. The voters want him, but only in combination with the Left Party."

The center-right Die Welt is more sceptical. "The chancellor felt besieged as a reformer, so he put himself up for a vote of confidence," writes the paper, "and now he's waged an anti-reform campaign to win back the voters' confidence." The paper notes that voters did skew left in their discontent, not right, so Merkel will have to build a coalition carefully. "In democracies, majorities trump truth," the paper writes. "Whoever wins the chancellorship, in the end, is less important than good politics. It's possible that Germany, as the Economist wrote three years ago, may have to be reformed from the left."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung says a "clear majority" has kicked out the old coalition of Schröder's SPD and Joschka Fischer's Green Party. However, "an equally clear majority doesn't want Angela Merkel to be chancellor." Her CDU/CSU may have won a hair's-breadth majority in parliament, but Merkel herself has lost a crucial mandate. The paper rejects the idea that she lost it for low reasons -- because she's a woman, or because she was born in the former East Germany. "A clear majority of German voters simply don't believe that with her convictions, and her shadow-cabinet, she can lead the country to better days. She's lost the real, the only true vote of confidence."

Most papers agree that a grand coalition between Schröder's party and Merkel's will get almost nothing done. "So much for talk of reform," writes the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "Or does anyone still think that in the near future any politician from either the SPD or the CDU will argue for it?" The paper argues that the retreat of Angela Merkel's flat-tax advocate, Paul Kirchhof - and his damage to her campaign - dramatizes the end of any serious reform conversation. Kirchhof's "demonization speaks volumes ... He became an ambassador for changing the system. His removal [from the campaign] is unambiguous." The Financial Times Deutschland would prefer a black-yellow-green coalition of Merkel's CDU with the business-friendly (yellow) FDP, and Greens. "This constellation remains the best possible," write the editors. "But it looks unlikely that the Greens in 2005 will put their most reasonable economic thinkers up to govern. So there will probably be a grand coalition."

The left-leaning Tageszeitung in Berlin tends to be a voice for German Greens, some of whom have talked about deserting the party if its leaders try to govern with either the CDU or the FDP. So Joachim Raschke, a political scientist, encourages his readers to bite the bitter apple and consider black-yellow-green. "Anything is better than a grand coalition," he writes. Not only can the Green Party save Germany from a deadlock in government between the two big parties, CDU and SPD -- and incidentally "end the vapid games of that narcissistic power-gambler, Schröder" -- it could learn to find broader common interests with its traditional foes. "If this proves impossible," he writes, "Greens will have to face more failed coalition-talks and content themselves with remaining in the opposition."