Despite her Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance's worst electoral showing in its history, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has emerged triumphant in Germany's parliamentary elections. Call it winning by losing. Chancellor Merkel will now seek to form a new center-right government with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), the big winners of the day who had their best showing ever increasing their vote total by some 50 percent over their previous showing. These results will catapult the openly gay FDP leader Guido Westerwelle as Germany's next foreign minister.

Despite the historic achievement of Herr Westerwelle, Germans will remember the 2009 elections as ushering in a political realignment with an increasingly splintered and perhaps disinterested if not disenchanted German electorate. Voter turnout was 72.5 percent, a record low. The two largest parties, the CDU and the SPD, saw their share of the vote fall from 69.4 percent in 2005 to just 56.1 percent. In 2002, the CDU and the SPD took 77 percent of the vote. Though the CDU lost a 1.5 percent share, the SPD, Europe's oldest working class party, saw its vote tally fall by 11.5 percent. It was the worst decline ever by a party in a German parliamentary election.

The Social Democrats' chancellor candidate, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the election night "a bitter defeat" for his party. The SPD is a now a soulless and frankly spineless party in search of itself, having abandoned its working class roots, forgoing its leftist credentials and having adopted policies that alienated its core constituency.

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