New Deadlock, Old Solution?

It has been more than two months since German Chancellor Angela Merkel began her struggle to form a coalition government in the wake of an election where her CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) and its sister CSU (Christian Social Union in Bavaria) received 32% of the votes. Negotiations between the CDU-CSU, Green Party, and the FDP (Free Democratic Party), which were supposed to end in the so-called “Jamaica" coalition, collapsed on the night of November 19^th/20^th. The FDP, sensing that they were to be the losers in such a coalition, pulled out, with FDP leader Christian Lindner bluntly stating that he believed it was better “not to rule than to rule badly.”