A quick rundown of German election news. Handelsblatt says the result is awaited with great tension, which perhaps tells you more about Handelsblatt than anything else. They also have a discussion of the coalition position.

In fact, in a sense, the coalition talks have already begun; the Ministry of the Interior has essentially made its opening bid, by issuing a list of demands for more surveillance and anti-terrorist powers. As the CDU is hoping to go into coalition with the FDP, this is probably best understood as setting a position from which they can bargain down. The FDP is predictably unimpressed.

There’s a row in Nordrhein-Westfalen, where the CDU prime minister is accused of spying on the SPD (he’s the one who was quoted as saying that Romanians couldn’t possibly assemble mobile phones). This is mostly important for his future career in the party; he’s standing for re-election in May and is a possible successor to Angela Merkel, if he doesn’t blow up.

Merkel, meanwhile, finished the election campaign by firing up the CDU activists with a speech about how Germany needs stability before anything else. Did anyone find this campaign a little dull? In fact, it’s not quite as bleak as that – she was referring to Adenauer’s 1957 campaign. The last polls, meanwhile, put the CDU/CSU on 33, the SPD on 25, the FDP on 14, the Left on 12 and the Greens on 10.

Both the “traffic light” and the Left/Left/Green option are level with or ahead of the CDU/FDP option; even if the FDP officially doesn’t want to talk, this may alter their calculations somewhat.

Der Standard has a look at the flashmobs that have been following the chancellor’s campaign, cheering at odd intervals and shouting out randomly selected words. (In the UK, it’s the other way around – the candidates shout nonsense at the public.)

In general, the conservative side is much less certain of success than it was a few weeks ago, rather as we predicted.

Al-Qa’ida’s opinion of the elections has been made known through a video; among other things, they threatened the terrors of the earth if a majority of Germans don’t vote for withdrawal from Afghanistan. A majority of Germans appears, going by the polls, to be unimpressed. Several foreign governments took him more seriously and issued warnings to travellers.

There’s a rundown of alternative options for your vote here; why not vote Violet for a spiritual politics?

It’s a tall order…but surely writing about German elections with statistics must beat it?

But there’s a German election coming up, although, as Der Spiegel points out, you might not have noticed, as both major parties are secretly quite pleased with the current situation. Polling data is here. Angela Merkel has spent the period since her triumph of 2005 governing well to the left of her party and being a quietly effective foreign-policy chancellor, just as we predicted; the Social Democrats have been struggling, as a result, to retain an independent profile, but (from their point of view) at least they’re in government, and paradoxically the main gainers from the economic crisis have been the FDP, the spokesmen for classical liberalism.

Their leader – still Guido Westerwelle after all these years – is behaving a little strangely in public, saying very frequently that he doesn’t believe there is any chance of the so-called traffic light coalition with the Social Democrats and Greens, but not saying that he rules it out. If the polls stay as they are, this would be the only chance of the Left taking power; but, of course, this is a huge assumption, especially in the light of their surge during the 2005 campaign. With the CDU on 37%, it’s essentially assumed that they are running up against demographic limits – a typically AFOE point, but a good one.

The all-time record conservative share of the vote is 39.7%, achieved in 1957, but more to the point, even another point-and-a-half would be more than one standard deviation from the long-run average, that is to say about a 3 in 10 chance. Theoretically, there is a 5% chance of getting to 42%, but if Konrad Adenauer couldn’t get over 40% in booming 1957 it’s probably even more unlikely that Merkel will in 2009. In fact, one thing that this little statistical exercise shows is that German party vote shares are very stable indeed – the SPD’s share of the vote has greater variance, but not that much.

So there is not much space for the rightwing vote to grow; and the Left Party is apparently stuck just under 10%. The strong Liberal showing – 15% in the current polls – suggests that the right could hope to form a new coalition without the Social Democrats, which would hold 50% of the vote. At the moment the only way the Social Democrats could checkmate this would be to get the Liberals and Greens into a coalition – the Left Party and the Greens wouldn’t be enough. This all assumes that nothing else changes, however; if the Left-Left-Green option was possible, all the coalition calculations would be altered, as the Liberals would face a serious risk of being left out in the cold. So what would it take to make it happen?

At the moment, the LLG coalition adds up to 46%, the “bourgeois” (i.e. CDU/FDP) option to 50%; so they need four percentage points to cross this strategic threshold. In fact, in so far as they are fighting a zero sum game, they might need fewer. The SPD’s share of vote in the current polls is on 23% – a shockingly low figure. In fact, based on the SPD’s historical vote shares, this would in itself be approaching a 1 in 100 event. Even taking account of the Left Party breakaway, the party polled just under the historical average last time out; and the 95% probability level corresponds to a vote share of 27.3%, which would put them back in the game. Actually, there doesn’t appear to be much covariance at all between the Left Party and SPD shares; this fits the explanation that the Left is still mostly the ex-PDS.

So I’m going to forecast that, even if the SPD looks down and out now, there’s an excellent chance of them being in with a chance on the night.