BERLIN -- When Germans choose a chancellor in September, Joschka Fischer will not be even close to winning the job. But that does not mean he'll be unhappy.
What counts for Fischer, the head of the environmentalist Green Party, are the votes that could make his party a kingmaker and give it a place in a Cabinet led by a bigger party. All he needs to achieve that is to ensure that the Greens -- now in opposition -- make no colossal blunders.
And therein lies the problem.
"There's no doubt that we will be in the government" after the Sept. 27 vote, Fischer, 50, said in a recent interview in the coffee shop of parliament in Bonn. Then he paused for only the briefest of seconds before adding, "Unless we make a big mistake."
In recent months the party has seemed to specialize in big mistakes, particularly those relating to what most Germans hold as a cherished right to drive very fast, consume corresponding amounts of gasoline and take vacations in fuel-guzzling jet planes.
Some Greens have demanded curbs on such activities. As a result, opinion surveys have shown the party dipping and rising erratically above and below the point of disaster.
But beyond the party's seesawing fortunes, the performance of the Greens in the election -- Germany's most important in decades -- highlights a quirk of the political system that gives small parties like Fischer's disproportionate influence in the forming of coalitions.
At the heart of this system is the magic number of 5 per cent. To win a full place in parliament with the right to form a caucus and head committees, political parties must win at least 5 percent of the vote.
As Germany heads for what is being depicted as the end of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's 16-year era, the rule is held as dearly as it was when it was devised in the aftermath of World War II to forge consensus politics in a land whose Nazi extremism had just devastated Europe.
"In the United States, consensus is embedded in society, like a skeleton," Fischer said. "In Germany it's like the carapace of a lobster: consensus is the outer shell."
In practical terms, the system means that neither Kohl's Christian Democrats nor the main opposition party, the Social Democrats led by Gerhard Schroeder, can assume that they will govern alone in the same way as the Republicans or the Democrats in the United States.
The Christian Democrats currently govern with the small Free Democrats. The Social Democrats lean toward a coalition with Fischer's Greens -- in German political parlance, a Red-Green coalition.
The pre-election banter depicts Kohl as a spent force and Schroeder as the essence of German renewal. In a recent opinion survey among 602 members of the business and political elite, 70 percent said they believed that Schroeder would win the election, even though 59 percent said they preferred Kohl.
And even though Schroeder consistently tops the opinion surveys as the most popular single politician in Germany, the system presses him toward a coalition with the very party -- the Greens -- whose support for the conservation and even the taxation of energy are proving increasingly irritating to him.
Indeed, his criticism has inspired one Green Party member, Heide Ruehle, to accuse Schroeder of torpedoing the Greens' electoral chances.
"As before, on the evening of Sept. 27 every option is imaginable," said the newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
In some ways, the election relates not so much to the titans as to the minions: the Greens, the Free Democrats and the former Communists, now the Party of Democratic Socialism.
The former Communists are in the current parliament under a separate rule permitting representation -- without the right to form a caucus -- for small parties that win overwhelming majorities in at least three constituencies, even though they slip below the 5 percent hurdle nationally.
If the Greens or the Free Democrats dip below the 5 percent barrier, the big parties with with they are associated will suffer. If the Party of Democratic Socialism improves its showing outside eastern Germany -- where it is expected to win a fifth of the vote, compared with close to zero in the west -- that, too, will upset the arithmetic of power in Bonn.
"Every vote for the PDS is a vote taken away from the Red-Green coalition," Fischer said. If there is one source of hope for him, though, it lies in the sense that whether Schroeder wins the election or not, Kohl will lose it because he has been in power for so long. "People have had enough of Kohl," Fischer said.
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