BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG

It is hard to overestimate the scale of the defeat for Chancellor Angela Merkel in this weekend's regional election in Baden-Württemberg, a Land which her party, the CDU, have run since 1953. Populous and wealthy, the state is in many ways the CDU's heartland. Although its share of the vote, at 39%, was still the largest of any party, support for its coalition partner, the FDP, collapsed. The big winners were the Greens, who polled just over 24% and who will now govern in coalition with the Social Democrats, who got a little less.

The big issue of the election was nuclear power, in the wake of the problems in Japan. Mrs. Merkel tried to defuse it by suspending for three months the Government's earlier decision to extend the life of the country's ageing nuclear reactors, four of which are based in Baden-Württemberg. However, as I said earlier this week, the problems in Japan have unleashed such great fears that one gesture was always unlikely to be enough. That was brutally confirmed this weekend.

Walter Blotscher