“Self-confident”, “smart” and “rhetorically brilliant” – just some of the adjectives the media have lavished upon Germany’s favourite politician as he has covered thousands of miles traversing the globe on his country’s behalf since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new centre-right administration took office late last month.

But Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is not in charge of foreign affairs — a position usually associated with voter popularity. He is defence minister.

Already nicknamed ”the other foreign minister“, the 37-year-old Guttenberg, a conservative former economy minister who cut his teeth on foreign policy, has won praise for his fluency in English, his directness and his ability to outshine more powerful counterparts on the international stage.

Watching the aristocratic AC/DC fan from the sidelines has been the new foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, whom newspapers have mocked for adopting a cautious, defensive approach that critics say is more redolent of, well, a German defence minister.

In fact, Westerwelle, 47, has already travelled thousands of miles further than his predecessor Frank-Walter Steinmeier over the same period. By the time the first month in office has passed he will have journeyed to some 15 states, including Israel, Afghanistan and the United States. Steinmeier managed only 10 and did not get beyond Europe in that time, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Germany might be the winner if its diplomatic duel helps it towards a more assertive foreign policy — something it has struggled to achieve in the long shadow of the Nazis.

But it could also find itself giving mixed messages to the outside world, to say nothing of potential tensions within the new coalition. Guttenberg belongs to the Bavarian CSU and Westerwelle heads the pro-business FDP — parties that have clashed on a range of policies in the past.

PHOTO: German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (R) chats with Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg during a session of the German lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin, November 11, 2009. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

When the late Joerg Haider, the hard-right populist governor of the southern Austrian state of Carinthia, sold most of his government's stake in Hypo Group Alpe Adria in 2007, he said, beaming: "Ladies and Gentlemen, Carinthia is rich."

BayernLB, which like many other German landesbanken appears to have never met a toxic asset it didn't like, had just paid 1.65 billion euros for a 50 percent stake in Hypo. Around half of that went into Haider's government's coffers.

True to his pork-barrel politics, Haider used the funds to, among other things, subsidise Carinthian teenagers' driving licence fees, scrap kindergarten fees, and pay out cash to Carinthian families to "offset inflation" in 2008, conveniently timed shortly before an election.

This worked to cement Haider's image as the generous leader looking after the man on the street. But since his death in a car crash last year, it shows that the basis of this policy was not sustainable. Hypo is now in urgent need of another year-end emergency capital injection of more than 1 billion euros, after it went cap in hand to the Austrian government and BayernLB for 1.6 billion euros last year already.

Hypo's breakneck expansion in the former Yugoslavia is the main reason for its continued losses this year. Haider and his confidante, ex-CEO Wolfgang Kulterer, started and presided over this expansion, which let Hypo's balance sheet balloon to more than four times what it was in 2002. (This is the same Kulterer who pleaded guilty last year of false accounting during his time as Hypo CEO.)

But Haider's heirs in Carinthia, which still owns 12 percent of the bank, refuse to tap into the proceeds from the Hypo sale to help BayernLB prop up the bank's balance sheet. They call for the Austrian federal government to step in.

"You can't portray Hypo as the bad guy and pretend all other banks losing money in eastern Europe were just 'unlucky,'" said Gerhard Doerfler, Haider's successor as governor of Carinthia. "Hypo must not be treated worse just because it's not based in Vienna." (The big Austrian players in eastern Europe will all remain profitable this year and either won't come for a second helping from the government's banking package or didn't tap it in the first place.)

Austria's finance ministry is so far holding its course and says recapitalising the bank is first and foremost an issue for the owners. They, including Carinthia, will meet on Dec. 10. Financial watchdog FMA has told the bank they need to approve a capital injection then or face sanctions. Carinthians will know then how much more wealth the government will be able to spread.

 

But at home in Germany, Merkel has been surprisingly timid on many key issues – especially when they involve her conservative Christian Democrats. Her tendency to avoid clear positions has driven her coalition partners mad. Merkel might be a lion when she’s on foreign stages but she tends to be a lamb at home. One of her favourite sayings is: “If you try to beat your head into a wall, the wall will usually win.”

Merkel’s latest evasive action centres on another woman in her party, Erika Steinbach. Ostensibly, it’s a relatively minor issue about a seat on the board of a new museum about the plight of German World War Two refugees. But in reality it is an issue that reverberates deeply in Merkel’s conservative party as well as across Germany’s eastern border in Poland. 

The League of Expellees, a powerful force in Merkel’s party, wants their leader Steinbach, who is a conservative member of parliament, on the museum’s board. Merkel’s past and present coalition partners have vetoed Steinbach (pictured above with Merkel) because of Poland’s objections to the woman with controversial views in the past on the German-Poland border and Poland’s membership in the European Union.    

So what does Merkel do?  She sits it all out and puts off any decision. That was her strategy when the issue came up earlier and this is now the sequel to the earlier round of the unfinished business.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a leader in the opposition Social Democrats who was Merkel’s foreign minister for the last four years, understands well her reluctance to take a stance on controversial issues at home. In a German TV interview on Thursday he put the finger in the wound and said: “Mrs. Merkel has to make up her mind.”

The situation is turning into a farce. Both Merkel and the League say it is the other side that has to make a decision.

There have been a number of other occasions where Merkel’s voice went oddly silent. She calls on other countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions but ducks questions about introducing a speed limit on Germany’s motorways that could cut emissions by 5-10 percent overnight. She first agreed to introduce a minimum wage in Germany with her Social Democrat coalition partners but did a quick U-turn when her party refused to go along.

 A year ago as the financial crisis was engulfing Europe and the world, Merkel faced withering criticism for her overly cautious response initially. Der Spiegel called her “Angela Mutlos” (Angela Faint-hearted) and acussed her of ”dangerous dithering”. It wrote: “Merkel has always been quiet, reticent, cautious. Merkel has failed to lead her country through a time of uncertainty.” At the time she also first refused to consider cutting taxes to stimulate growth but reversed course under pressure from powerful barons in her party with a series of small steps and was suddenly in favour of tax cuts a few weeks later.

Last month, in coalition talks for a new centre-right government, Merkel kept going out the back door to avoid journalists each evening and remained silent when a controversy erupted over her government’s short-lived proposal to create a shadow budget to borrow 50 billion euros. This week Der Spiegel published a story on her powerful Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who said that Merkel’s weakness is she likes to surround herself with yes men.

So is Merkel really the world’s most powerful woman?

Two years ago Sigmar Gabriel came into the Reuters office in Berlin for an interview about climate change, the environment, renewable energy policies and the state of his Social Democrats.

The burly minister, who was elected leader of Germany’s struggling centre-left SPD party on Friday, had clearly lost weight on his summer holiday that had just ended so, while my colleagues were still streaming into the conference room, I asked: “You’ve lost some weight, haven’t you?”

Gabriel smiled briefly. Colleagues later told me they were horrified that I had asked him about his weight. It was merely an attempt to break the ice. There was, after all, another German political leader a few years ago who was once even heavier and lost more than 50 kg with an intensive jogging and diet programme that began one summer: Joschka Fischer of the Greens.

“Yeah, I did,” Gabriel said. “I got some exercise on my holiday. But I won’t be able to keep it off if people keep putting things like this in front of me like you’ve done here,” he added with a laugh as he munched on some cookies.

Gabriel soon regained the few kilos he had lost – so did so did Fischer.

Gabriel, who even then was clearly one of the most ambitious politicians of his generation, has a bigger worry right now.

How do you save Germany’s oldest party? The SPD won just 23 percent of the vote in the September election and left government after an 11-year run. That was down 11 points from four years ago and a staggering 18 points off the 41 percent they won when winning the chancellery in 1998. About 10 million voters who backed the SPD in 1998 have abandoned the party.

“We’ve lost half of our voters since 1998,” Gabriel, 50, told the party congress in a two-hour speech. “We’ve lost them in all directions: some don’t vote any more, some went to the conservatives, some to the Free Democrats, some to the Left party and some to the Greens. What’s clear is that a party that loses its support like that has lost its profile.”

So why did Gabriel take on this job? There wasn’t a long list of candidates which, considering the way the party has treated its leaders the past two decades, is understandable. The SPD leadership job has turned into an ejection seat. The party had just three different chairmen between 1950 and 1990 but there have been 11 different leaders since 1990 and an incredible six since 2004. Many have left involuntarily. Gabriel ran unopposed.

“That’s not healthy for our party,” said Gabriel when asked about the rapid changes in leadership. “One delegate came up to me and said he had a Christmas wish: that I’d be the party chairman for at least the next two years. I told him I also had a Christmas wish: that in a year he would have the same Christmas wish.”

Gabriel, once a school teacher whose mother was a nurse, was in the second tier of his party’s leadership before the September election debacle and an environment minister who courted controversy with environmental groups at times. He was ambitious and long had his eye on the job of one day becoming parliamentary floor leader, a top-tier job in the SPD hierarchy. Outside Germany, he was probably best known for adopting Knut, the polar bear born in Berlin’s Zoo.

Gabriel’s brusque humour and prickly nature had rubbed many in the SPD the wrong way. We’ve heard others in the SPD leadership -– in similar off-the-record comments in meetings in the Reuters office -– tell us they believed there was no way Gabriel would get the top job.

Now, in a single leap, he’s skipped the intermediate step and clinched the party’s top job. A television journalist told him: “Six months ago I never would have dreamt you’d be the SPD chairman now.”

“Neither did I,” said Gabriel. “Neither did I.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. "green cards", student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system -- which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

It is globalisation that lies at the heart of our transformational post-Cold War World. This inexorable process has extended the opportunities of world-wide interchange. Driven by technological advances in transport, communications, and electronic networks, globalisation has delivered massive opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance.

But this same globalisation process and associated technology has also brought major new threats, or intensified existing ones, rendering everyone increasingly inter-dependent and vulnerable. The threat we face is seamless, running across the boundaries of defence, foreign affairs, domestic and social life. For instance, it has left nations and peoples ever more vulnerable to phenomena ranging from international crime and terrorism through to cyber-attack, health pandemics, energy-politics, resource shortage and financial crises.

The net result is that there are far more sources of insecurity than during the Cold War. The uncertainty this generates means that crises (defined as crucial turning points in events rather than as catastrophes) are more recurrent. Moreover, this bias towards instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. In the context of international migration, for instance, terrorists and other international criminals are constantly trying to find new ways to evade our security safeguards.

Given the complexity of the threats we face, it is essential as a nation that we continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. If we are to be able to keep up, and potentially be one step ahead of our adversaries, we will increasingly need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions.

This is a relatively uncontroversial ambition, shared by many. But I believe it requires nothing less than new thinking, new urgency and a new approach to studying tomorrow’s security problems today.

That’s partly why we are establishing the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London. The new Centre will address projects of vital importance to national and international security arising from globalisation in the post-Cold War World. The goal is to assess and embed resilience as well as analysing threats; and to extend this analysis into action in outlining policy options to shape our preparation, response and recovery to crises.

This insistence on “embedding” resilience throughout organisational structures and culture is essential given the nature of contemporary society. Where there is, for instance, now a global availability of information through the internet, satellite and mobile communications, resilience to threats must be embedded in a decentralised way (rather than top-down). To the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on an elite management at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case -- hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with academics in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects.

The goal must be nothing less that ensuring that government, business and society can not only cope with, but flourish, in the increasingly uncertain times in which we live. The fall of that wall symbolised the emergence of a world offering both unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented insecurities. The challenge of maximising the first and countering the latter is a legacy demanding an ingenuity and endurance from the next and subsequent generations to match that of their predecessors.

One of the most amazing aspects about the Berlin Wall’s sudden collapse 20 years ago was that no one lost their nerve. Not a single shot was fired. The Cold War ended with the biggest street party Berlin, or any city anywhere, has ever seen. 

Who would have thought that’s how the Berlin Wall would go out? Berlin’s long division was the result of World War Two. The Wall was the focal point of the Cold War — Soviet and American tanks faced off almost barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie. Not surprisingly, many people thought that the stalemate would only be changed by another war. But instead on Nov. 9, 1989 there was no bang, no blood. Just a lot of celebrating. And a lot of tears.

That’s for me probably the most fascinating thing about the sudden implosion of the Communist East German regime — it went out so peacefully. And that’s one of the themes that has been touched upon in the myriad of German media accounts in recent weeks ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall on Nov. 9.

It’s also an issue that’s been explored by Reuters correspondents in Berlin past and present — in a series of  stories that you can read on this special page . 

The collapse of the Wall was for Reuters a special occasion — not only because it was both the first to report the news to the world that the Wall had fallen but also because it was the first to report it was being built 28 years earlier, as my German language service colleague Volker Warkentin notes in his illumating story (click here) about the famous press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 that led to the Wall bursting open in the hours that followed.

Guenter Schabowski, a Politburo member, had inadverently announced at the very end of that otherwise dull hour-long news conference that East Germans would be allowed to travel directly to the West from now on.  Schabowski was asked when the new rules took effect and stammered: “That comes into effect…according to my information…. immediately, without delay,” he said, shuffling through the papers spread in front of him as he sought in vain for more information. It later emerged the announcement was not supposed to be released until 4 a.m. the next morning and it was supposed to include instructions for an orderly process of applying for visas first — not the mad dash to the border that he caused.

Tom Heneghan, the bureau chief for Germany at the time, was in East Berlin writing many of the stories on that famous evening when the Wall burst open. But as the American journalist notes in his intriguing story  (click here) there was so much going on that many of the details of the action only came to be known later.  “What we only found out much later was that Schabowski silently asked himself: ‘I wonder if this has been cleared with the Soviets.’ He didn’t know!”, Heneghan writes. “Later that evening, as the world’s eyes zeroed in on the partying at the Wall, East Germany’s communist leader Egon Krenz was pacing the long corridors of the Central Committee headquarters alone mumbling ‘What should I do now?’  What a gem that would have been in our story that night.”

Douglas Hamilton, who came to Berlin from Paris to reinforce the bureau, was out on the streets on that night and describes the scene here. Paul Taylor, who later came to Berlin from Jerusalem, steps back here to look at Germany’s relations neighbours then and now. Ralph Boulton, who worked for many years in East Berlin for Reuters, recalls some of his experiences here in this post.

Fabrizio Bensch, who was in his last year of high school in West Berlin, grabbed his camera and went to Checkpoint Charlie when he heard on the news the Wall was opening. But it took another hour or so before the first East Germans came through. ”It changed my life,” said Bensch, who decided on that night he wanted to be a photojournalist. Here’s his story.

Perhaps the most moving story is Peter Jebautzke’s. He grew up in East Germany and always dreamed of climbing in the Alps. But the Berlin Wall (3.5 metres high) kept him away from the 4,000 metre high peaks — until Nov. 9. Here’s what Jebautzke did when the Wall finally opened. 

There are many theories about what led to the Wall’s opening in 1989 — my personal favourite story is that Bruce Springsteen may have helped let the genie out of the bottle a year earlier when he held a concert in front of 160,000 people in East Berlin and said: “I came here to play rock ‘n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”

But colleagues currently working in Berlin have also weighed in with interesting examinations of what’s going on now, 20 years later.  Paul Carrel writes that the economy in formerly Communist East Germany has recovered in the last two decades in this story even if it’s not quite the “flourishing landscapes” everywhere that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl had promised.

And Madeline Chambers shows that thousands of former workers at the loathed Stasi security police still have no remorse for the repressive regime they so ruthlessly kept in power. Here’s her story.

The German media have also had a lot of great stories. The ARD network had a fascinating documentary “Schabowskis Zettel” (Schabowski’s note) that ends with the head of the border guards at the first crossing point to open the Wall, Harald Jaeger, getting home early in the morning of Nov. 10 and telling his wife: “Honey, I just opened the Wall last night.” And then she said: “Erzaehl nicht so dummes Zeug” (Don’t come in here with rubbish like that).

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago on Nov. 9, 1989. A team of Reuters correspondents and multimedia journalists from Berlin and London will be covering the major event in a completely new way — Berlin Wall 2.0. The team from The Berlin Project are joining forces with the Reuters text, pictures and TV correspondents in Berlin to present real-time coverage and impressions of everything going on in Germany’s reunited capital city.

You can also view the best of Reuters’ content on our Berlin Wall global coverage page, follow the team in Berlin on Facebook and get a behind the scenes look at Berlin 2.0 by visiting The Berlin Project. Please send us your thoughts and memories by commenting on the live blog below.

Click on the points on the map below to find out where in the city the Berlin Project team have been reporting from and to listen to their audio reports.

More from the Berlin Project

After spending the last four years trapped in a loveless grand coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel is looking forward to happier, more productive days in a cosy new centre-right coalition with her preferred partners, the pro-business Free Democrats.

However, rather than smooth sailing with her new, more like-minded coalition partners, it’s turned out to be one turf battle after another between Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on the one side and the Free Democrats on the other.

Weeks of unseemly arguing over tax cuts, healthcare, conscription and other issues in coalition talks has earned the new coalition the nickname Fehlstart” (false start) in the German media.

That awkward beginning was confirmed in a most embarrassing fashion for Merkel on Wednesday when at least nine deputies in her own coalition withheld their support.

Merkel was easily re-elected chancellor with 323 votes in the 622-seat parliament, 11 more than she needed. The nine deputies who either abstained or voted against her in the secret ballot served as a tangible reminder that the CDU/CSU and FDP might not be the marriage made in heaven some had expected. It was a political kick in the shins that Merkel did not need.

Four years ago she got 397 of the 612 votes, 51 less than the CDU/CSU and SPD had together. That, however, was not surprising because the grand coalition had an enormous majority in parliament and because the two camps had long been such arch enemies. This time around it was nine deputies in her own preferred coalition who stabbed her in the back. Is that a harbinger of things to come?

“Let’s try forget about this,” said Volker Kauder, CDU parliamentary floor leader. Several conservatives are already picking holes in the coalition deal, which is only a few days old. Kauder said he was sure all the CDU/CSU deputies voted for Merkel. The FDP’s parliamentary floor leader, Birgit Homburger, said the same of her party.

At least one of them was wrong. 

PHOTO: Merkel reacts after her re-election on Wednesday by a narrower than expected margin in parliament. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

It was a weekend of mixed fortunes for the German
government’s aristocratic AC/DC fan Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

    In Sunday’s federal election, the 37-year-old conservative
Economy Minister won 68.1 percent of the direct votes in his
constituency — more than any other politician in Germany, and
nearly 20 points more than Chancellor Angela Merkel — and
earning him the nickname “King of the votes” in German media.

    However, his Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavarian sister
party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats, had their worst day at
the polls in 60 years, taking just 42.6 percent of the vote in
the state they have ruled almost single-handedly since the war.

    With turnout at a record low, Merkel’s conservatives secured
a mandate to form Germany’s first centre-right coalition since
1998 with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).

    But the success enjoyed by Freiherr Guttenberg — mockingly
dubbed the “Baron from Bavaria” by former Social Democrat
chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — could pose problems for the
CSU’s populist leader, Horst Seehofer.

    Keen to quash any talk of a leadership tussle with the
telegenic hard rock fan and sometime DJ, the 60-year-old
Seehofer told a board of directors in Munich: “You can’t start
coalition talks with questions about staff.”

    Despite its campaign slogan: “What our country needs now: a
stronger CSU in Berlin”, the CSU heads into coalition talks
weakened. Buoyed by its best ever performance, the FDP will
likely have twice as many seats as the CSU in parliament and
hopes to take control of three or four portfolios.

    Guttenberg, who has risen to the top of the popularity
charts since his appointment in February, is viewed as a
potential finance minister and possible chancellor one day –
and increasingly eyed with suspicion by his own party leader.

    Seehofer may therefore find himself in the awkward position
of having to rely on Guttenberg to secure influence in Berlin at
the risk of increasing his party rival’s power.

    This could prompt Seehofer to shore up his own power base in
Bavaria by winning back voters who defected to the FDP in the
vote — even if it means destabilising the coalition in Berlin.

PHOTO: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg at the Frankfurt IAA exhibition on Sept. 24, 2009. REUTERS/Johannes Eisele

Sunday’s federal election threw Germany’s Greens into a state of disarray — should they celebrate their best result ever or mourn the fact they failed to prevent a centre-right coalition and languished in fifth place?

“A Victory that is a Defeat”, “Triumph and Bitterness”, “Celebrations despite missing goal,” read newspaper headlines on Monday.

(Photo: Kuenast and Trittin, top candidates of the Greens party, arrive on stage after the general election, Sept 27, Reuters/Ralph Orlowski)

The Greens, one of the world’s most successful environmental parties, won more than a tenth of the vote — not bad for a party whose members entered parliament as revolutionary rebels in the 1980s flourishing potted plants and sporting woolly jumpers.

“We feel strengthened in our fight for ecological modernisation, social justice and civil rights by the best result we have ever had,” co-leader Juergen Trittin told hundreds of party faithful on Sunday evening at the Greens headquarters in Berlin.

But a German colleague who attended the event, Hans-Edzard Busemann, told me the ambiance was confused rather than euphoric, and faces fell when they saw the results for the first time.

No wonder. The Greens were hoping to be the third strongest party at the elections and kingmakers in governemnt coalition talks — a goal they missed by a long stretch, trailing behind their nemesis the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) on 14.6 percent and the far-left Linke on 11.9 percent.

They campaigned hard to prevent a centre-right coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives with the pro-business Free Democrats — and failed.

Such a coalition is likely to undo much of the work that the Greens, who emerged from the anti-nuclear and peace movememnts of the 1970s, carried out while ruling with the Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005.

For a start, it will probably rewrite a national nuclear phaseout deal by allowing reactors to run longer than the previously agreed 2020 deadline. (Click here to see a story that a colleague in Frankfurt, Vera Eckert, wrote about this earlier today)

It will also likely change or drop the generous feed-in law for renewable energies introduced by the Greens and SPD, a prospect which sent shares in highly subsidised solar firms such as Q-Cells and Solarworld sliding on Monday.

(Photo: Supporters of the Green party react after the first exit polls, Sept 27, Reuters/Ralph Orlowski)

And as if all that that weren’t enough, Greens co-leader Cem Oezdemir — the only member of an ethnic minority to have ever headed a German party — failed to win a seat a parliament despite securing 30 percent of the vote in his constituency in Stuttgart.

So despite their best election result ever, the Greens may not be able to avoid some soul-searching over the coming weeks and months.

Some political analysts argue very little has changed in their manifesto over the past four years and the party executive, with the exception of Oezdemir, is still the same. Will Sunday’s result prompt a Greens renewal?