The weather is reasonably nice today and I'm taking the opportunity to go out with the Nordic walking poles once more.

Actually I did that yesterday, too. It's good to get moving again and I should really do it more often! There are any number of “rounds” – anything between three and twelve kilometres – in the immediate vicinity (the advantages of living on the outskirts of town within a stone-throw of the vineyards), and as long as we don't have the summer sun and heat I don't even need to drive to the little forest in order to be able to walk in the shade.

In the evening, the TV is full of election stuff – debates among the candidates and talk shows where various pundits talk about the debates among the candidates. All of this does not lead to a lot of new enlightenment; everybody seems to be firmly “dug in” and there has been very little movement in the opinion polls, although we're told that 20% of voters have not yet made up their minds. The right-wing AfD party still hovers around 20% but everyone else is averring that they will never, ever, EVER consider a coalition with them. The CDU/CSU, of course, had their little tempest in a teacup the other week where they put forward a migration limitation bill that mostly themselves and the AfD voted for (it didn't get through), and the SPD is now trying to exploit that by insinuating that after the election the CDU/CSU would immediately form a coalition with the AfD, and the only way to prevent that, of course, would be to vote SPD. This looks like a pretty transparent ploy (CDU leader Merz has been quite clear that he doesn't want a coalition with the AfD, there's a huge difference between proposing something that the AfD happens to also like and actually collaborating with the AfD, let alone starting a coalition, and to do it would be complete political suicide by nuclear bomb, so I'm prepared to take him at his word) but of course chancellor Scholz (SPD) wants to hang on to his job and somehow needs to find 20% of the vote to do so (unlikely).

What's nice is that according to the polls we might finally see the last of the old Stalinist battle-axe, Sahra Wagenknecht, who by her own admission believes that if she isn't elected to the Bundestag, her political career will be over. Her eponymous party is now polling at 4.5% nationwide, which is below the 5% cutoff. But OTOH recently she didn't have much of a political career in any case – we've seen a lot more of her in TV talk shows than in the actual parliament, so chances are it won't make much of a difference either way. Of course if she is no longer a parliamentarian then the talk shows may not be that interested in her, either.

The big question, really, is whether the result of the vote enables the CDU to form a coalition with only one other party (the SPD or the Greens) or whether a three-party coalition is needed (and how well that went is something the last three years have shown us). Fortunately our situation is unlikely to degrade to something similar to what we see in Israel, where to form a government you need to shepherd a whole zoo of possibly-radical parties and you're in constant danger of one or two of them stomping off in a snit and causing the whole arrangement to collapse. But chances are that we're looking at a five-party parliament (the CDU/CSU, the AfD, the Greens, the SPD, and the left-wing “Linke”), and with a three-party CDU/CSU/Greens/SPD coalition likely, we'll probably not see a lot of political change although that would be badly needed.