Last night was election night in Germany and I was wearing a random yellow t-shirt. Before running out the door on a bike run to Prenzlauer Berg, I put on my trusty black corduroy jacket. Soon I was biking across Kreuzberg proudly flaunting the yellow-black team colours of what will likely be the new ruling coalition of Germany. The horror. It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway through Mitte, but it did explain some of the commentary I’d been getting along the way. But before you blame me for yesterday’s outcome, know that the polls had long since closed. Though I still feel bad about it even if my accidental timing was perfect and zeitgeisty. Re-elected chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right party, CDU (black—see graphic for colour-party alignment—not everyone lives in Germany), emerged with just about the same proportion of power it had pre-election. Though considering how poorly the centre-left SPD performed last night (down to 23% from 34%) and how well the libertarian FDP did (up to 15% from 9%), everyone, not least Merkel herself, is talking about switching from a black-red coalition to black-yellow. That’s got not a few people worried. As the closest German equivalent to the United States’ Republican party, the pro-business, anti-tax FDP might have more in common with the CDU, but an CDU-FDP coalition is a worrisome prospect, not only for the fractured progressive arm of German politics, but for beneficiaries of the German social democratic model, a safety net model that’s helped Germany weather the recession better than most.

illustration by Spiegel Online—gray numbers are 2005, black numbers are 2009

One surprising development, though, was the upstart Pirate Party and it’s respectable 2 percent from zero, as in not even existing four years ago. A friend of mine who voted for the Pirates, confirming my suspicions about the party’s core, told me a recent party rally was 80% pasty-faced, greasy-haired, Matrix-jacketed math or physics or computer science students. Which is great, because we need those guys fighting for personal security instead of national security. And Berlin has a lot of those guys.

What I’ll miss most from this election season is not the stimulating debate (of which there was precious little this go-round) but quite possibly the election posters that’ve been scattered around the city, uselessly vying for my attention, as I couldn’t vote if I wanted to. There is something stunningly bizarre about German election posters that I can’t quite put my finger on, but if I had to, I’d say it was the smiles. Oh the smiles. What is so hard about a genuine smile? Quite a lot it turns out. Correct operation of the orbicularis oculi muscles for starters. But some of the smiles that have jumped out at me in the last few weeks have been downright terrifying in their tight-lipped contempt of humanity and love of power, delicious power.

This is my favourite of the genre, Peter Schantz. He was FDP candidate for direct mandate in the district of Wilmersdorf-Charlottenburg, where I work, and boy is his smile amazing. Amazingly scary. To be fair, every FDP candidate has obviously been trained by the same smile coach, who I’m positive is constantly barking, “Emit light! Not warmth! Licht! Nicht Wärme!” But this brings me to a question, one I’ve toyed with these last few days of electioneering. Namely, does a fake smile indicate a fake person or, indeed, a helplessly genuine one? I cannot figure that one out.

Stumble it!