Always felt like the cleats were on the inside.

Know what I'd like to do with these cruddy cleats?

The French Socialist Party never had its aggiornamento or Bad Godesberg (where the German SPD in 1959 renounced its last vestiges of Marxism). Instead, the party long defended the theory of a revolutionary rupture with capitalism, never clearly acknowledging its reformist nature.

Indeed, after Lafontaine s The Left party merged with eastern Germany s ex communists, it secured a firm base among voters, changing the political equilibrium in the country. Faced with the prospect of losing members and voters to the new party, the SPD simply cannot afford to continue Schröder s reform agenda.

Schröder s SPD uses the word social a little more emphatically than it did in the last seven years. The opposition CDU leader, Angela Merkel, has linked its program to the ambitious ideas of an outsider, former Constitutional Court judge Paul Kirchhof, seeking a dramatic simplification of the tax system.

The second unknown concerns what, exactly, separates the major parties in this contest. The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) are both committed to the social market economy, to the essentials of corporatist economic management, to maintaining the entitlements of the welfare state, and to the EU and NATO.

The third unknown is the performance of the Left Party, a new formation positioned to the left of the SPD and built on East Germany s ex communist PDS, with the addition of a significant number of dissident Social Democrats in the West who proclaim themselves to be defenders of the welfare state.

So Germany will be left with a grand coalition just as the German electorate wanted. The SPD will recoil at the prospect, sit on the fence, and finally give in, because Merkel has a powerful disciplinary instrument she could call a new election, in which the CDU would probably win an outright majority.

That December vote on the EU Constitutional Treaty closed this parenthesis by approving of it, the Socialists consciously accepted a reformist, social democratic, European identity. They have positioned themselves as a great power on the left, with a central position in the European Socialist Party, offering an alternative to the prescriptions of New Labour and the SPD.

Thus, Merkel has so far dampened any hope that the important and hard reforms that she announced during her campaign and that Germany urgently needs will be carried out under the CDU SPD grand coalition government. To be sure, she has put healthcare reform and a reform of company taxation on the agenda, but the plans presented so far give no indication of a major breakthrough.