Germany: Berlin is still reeling from Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's decision to force an early general election that could mark the end of his seven-year coalition with the Green Party.
The chancellor's plan to force an election, by calling and deliberately losing a confidence motion, would have to come at the latest by July 1st, the last Bundestag sitting before the summer break.
President Horst Köhler, whose decision it is to dissolve parliament, would have 21 days to do so, leading to a new election within 60 days, at the latest on September 18th.
Mr Köhler met Mr Schröder yesterday but has yet to grant the request, but the announcement already started a new round of soul-searching in Mr Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD), as the reality began to sink in of the weekend loss of the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, after 39 years.
Left-wingers in the SPD, unhappy with economic reforms they see as at odds with the party's social democratic roots, said the party "has to discuss political content and strategies" and make a clear shift to the left before the election. But SPD leaders in Berlin said the party would hold its present course.
"The social market economy stands under great pressure. We will now give people the choice of social market economy or the market radicalism of (the CDU)," said Klaus-Uwe Benneter, the SPD general secretary.
Even if Mr Schröder's political gamble succeeds and the SPD is re-elected, there is already political speculation that his seven-year coalition with the Green Party, the so-called "red-green experiment", could be at an end.
A new SPD-Green government would face a continued blockade for its reform proposals in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament which is controlled by the CDU. Just one more state election defeat for the SPD would give the CDU a two-thirds Bundesrat majority, enabling the party to block almost any law.
"If you really want to solve the blockade in the Bundesrat and Bundestag, as [ SPD leader] Franz Münterfering said, then a grand coalition is the most likely. Perhaps even with the SPD as junior partner," said Prof Franz Walter, political scientist at the University of Göttingen. "One thing is clear, the SPD will not run a red-green election campaign."
The SPD's greatest difficulty in a looming general election, as the state election at the weekend showed, will be to motivate its core voters with clear policies and win back voter confidence in key competences of the economy and job creation.
"For years in opposition the SPD didn't have clear policies on foreign affairs, education or economics; now they have new positions every three months. This [ political] generation doesn't have any crystal-clear convictions," said Prof Walter.
A flash survey by ARD public television on Sunday night showed that just 29 per cent of respondents would vote for the SPD, with 46 per cent prepared to vote for the CDU.
There appeared little doubt yesterday that the CDU would be led into the election by party leader Dr Angela Merkel, although she has yet to receive the party's formal nomination. At the last general election in 2002, she deferred to Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber, leader of the sister Christian Social Union (CSU).
"It's not a big surprise that we want to go into the campaign with Mrs Merkel as our candidate," Roland Koch, minister-president of the state of Hesse and a one-time leadership hopeful, said yesterday. Christian Wulff, minister-president of Lower Saxony, said he would be "very surprised" if Dr Merkel wasn't chosen.
The first election campaign statement came yesterday afternoon before the campaign even began from CDU Europe politician Matthias Wissmann.
"We will tell people that the likelihood of Turkey achieving full membership of the EU is much lower with us," he said.
Mr Schröder will be only the third Chancellor in post-war Germany to have faced a confidence vote. Germany's post-war leaders went out of their way in the 1949 constitution to prevent a repeat of the situation in inter-war Weimar Germany, when opposition Nazis and Communists joined forces to force votes of no confidence in the then chancellor without having enough votes to elect an alternative candidate.