The new German government emerging from Sunday's elections, a renewed "Red-Green" coalition, may hold power by the slimmest majority in the history of the state. But, courtesy of an electoral system that fills vacancies from party lists instead of by-elections, there is no reason - unlikely internal splits apart - why it should not survive a full term.
Defeated Dr Edmund Stoiber's CDU/CSU still retains a majority in the Bundesrat (Upper House) and he has threatened to obstruct the attempts of the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, to reform the German economy. But he may find such tactics meet with little public sympathy in the wake of a renewed mandate for the Chancellor and his hugely popular foreign minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, of the Greens. The latter was the real election winner, raising the Green vote to an historic high of 8.6 per cent - a performance which fellow Greens throughout Europe would do well to analyse. The CDU/CSU vote, at 38.5 per cent, although tying with the SDP and up on its poor 1998 showing, remains below the 40 per cent share to which it has aspired.
The election also marks an important consolidation, psychologically, of a generational shift to a leadership which owes its formation more to 1968 than to the second World War or its aftermath. Germany retains a deep sensitivity to the sins of the grandfathers, but can stand tall again, unapologetic. Its memory of undiluted power and militarism inspires a profound and genuine commitment to realise Germany's ambitions through European political union. Confidence in the younger generation of politicians has allowed Mr Schröder and Mr Fischer to justify the deployment of German troops abroad in combat roles, but also to stand up publicly to the US against its ambitions in Iraq. Europe's own evolving political self-confidence and identity - internationalist, multilateralist, and environmentally sensitive - is being forged in part out of this coming of age of German democracy.
And Europeans' commitment to their own model of social protection - pace Mr McCreevy - is reaffirmed by a result that has reversed the right-wing trend seen recently in elections across the continent. Mr Schröder's neue Mitte, his version of the Blairite Third Way, has still to prove itself in making inroads on the country's 10 million unemployed. But its vision of social solidarity still has a powerful appeal.
Mr Schröder's victory will ensure that the question "Boston or Berlin" will still be one we can meaningfully ask.