Jim Geraghty has some thoughts about what the United States can learn from the mess that resulted from the German election.

Thank goodness for our two major parties and the Electoral College. After weeks of intense campaigning, Germans (and others around the world) tuned in on election night and learned... nothing. The vote was split amongst the five major parties.

The right-of-center Christian Democrats got 35.2 percent; their traditional allies, the FDP, received 9.8 percent — no majority there. On the Left, the Social Democrats got 34.3 percent; their current allies, the Greens, garnered 8.1 percent; and the new way-out-there Left party that none of the other parties want to work with received 8.6 percent.

Somebody's going to have to create a government out of this mess. The initial expectation was that the two largest parties would merge and create a government of centrist, watered-down, divided, no-real-change status quo policies, a state given the happy-talk title, "Grand Coalition." But the Christian Democrats have, for now, rejected that idea.

Later on election night, the hot idea was the "traffic light" coalition — the red of the Social Democrats (keeping Gerhard Schroeder as chancellor) the green of the Greens, and the yellow of the FDP, an economically conservative, business-oriented party. But the FDP explicitly rejected that on Election Night, arguing they campaigned on a platform of economic reforms, and were not interested in keeping the current leadership and policies.

Can you imagine some situation in America when we would have to have a coalition government of Republicans and Democrats running the government together. I'm not talking about divided government between Congress and the president. I'm talking about running the executive branch together. It is just unimaginable. The reason we have two parties is because they disagree fundamentally on how the government should run. And thinking of some coalition between a major and minor party would just move that party more to the extremes.

Luckily for me, this story about Germany comes just as my classes are discussing political parties in the United States and the chapter starts off by comparing our party system to Europe's.