The results in todays election in germany are very surprising. Polls had shown a close call for the opposition parties (CDU, CSU and FDP) to take over government. But the first results shortly after the booths had closed gave a very different view, and this didn't change much during the evening (the counting is still in progress).

The "to-be winner", the conservative CDU-CSU sister parties (sometimes named "Union"), are around 35%, which is 3% short of their previous result, likely to become their third worst result ever and is 6% short of their result in the polls. The previously biggest party, the german socialists, dropped to 34%, which had come out at the polls. The partner of the Union partys, the german liberals (don't confuse this with "liberals" in the US, this is a lot about having less regulations... but they do civil rights, too) had a surprisingly good result with 10% (they were expected to have 6.5%). The german greens, which are also part of the current government, lost slightly to 8%, also one percent above the poll results. The left-wing "Die.Linke" party, a joint party of the PDS party - said to be the successor of the communist SED party of former eastern germany - an a spin-off of the "socialists" SPD, achieved the expected 8-9%.

This brings an awkward situation to germany: the expected coalition of CDU-CSU and FDP does not have enough mandates to form government, the current government is even further off. Noone is willing to cooperate with the left-wing (which in my opinion has no sense for reality and no working concepts, and the only good thing they achieved is to make the nazi right-wing partys lose any significant share...).

This leaves basically three options: socialists and conservatives, dubbed the "grand coalition", the "traffic lights" combination of socialists, greens and liberals, and the "black traffic light" or "jamaica" coalition of conservatives, greens and liberals. I would favour the latter, since this would mean an actual change.

To make it even more weird, the liberals have announced that they will not form government with either the socialists or the greens (since they promised to do away with the red-green government). Including the conservative-led jamaica coalition, where the greens would be the weakest partner of all.

So we have only the conservative-socialist coalition left (which in turn would make the liberals fail, since this means red is part of the government because of them!) - which will hardly work out. The conservatives have done a really bad campaign, which basically consisted of "7 years red-green is enough", and other "socialists are stupid" slogans...

Now both leaders of the conservatives and of the socialists claim to be the winners of the election (both parties have an historically bad result) and want to become chancellor...

However this will turn out (my bet is that the liberals change their mind, as usual...) - it will be interesting to watch.

Because of this situation, it is next to impossible to tell what the outcome will mean for open source software, civil rights or bicyclists. ;-)