Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. We've had a little more than a week to try and digest the results of the German election.

And today Helen and I are joined by Matthew Kahnicnyg to try to make sense of what these elections mean for Germany, for Europe, and for the world.

Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Rio of Books, which has its own weekly podcast.

Recent episodes include Dominic West, Reading Patrick Lee Firmall, a many series of encounters with the lives and voices of women in Medieval literature and an interview with me about Peter Teal, the subject of my latest LRB piece.

Just search for the LRB podcast on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Matt Kahnicnyg is the chief European correspondent for Politico and he's based in Berlin, where he's been covering German politics for more than 20 years.

He was in Berlin when we spoke to him on Wednesday morning and we're going to try and make sense of all the different coalition permutations that might come out of this election.

But we thought we should start by reminding all of us what actually happened.

Maybe we should start because we are taking advantage of the benefit of a week in a bit hindsight by just reminding ourselves and people listening what happened in the election mat.

Did anything about the result 10 days ago surprise you? There was a lot of speculation beforehand as there always is and lots of polling analysis.

When the final result came through, was it what you were expecting?

The result was what I was expecting given the polls, but I think I and a lot of other people were still surprised.

It was one of these moments where when you actually see what has just happened, it really hits you. And what hit me was that the CDU Angler Miracles party that's obviously been running Germany for the past 16 years suffered this historically poor result.

It's worse result since World War II.

And I think that has been reverberating ever since. So it was something that we knew was coming, but once it actually hits, you know, I think that is still a surprising moment, especially the fallout that we've seen since then.

And did anything take you by surprise with the result? I mean, it was very close. We should remind people it was less than two percentage points between the CDU, CSU and the SPD, the Greens,

who had been polling much higher. I mean, for British listeners, it was a bit like Nick Clegan in 2010. There was a bit of green mania, but it fell away.

The Greens came in about 14%. Was this what you were expecting?

I'm not sure I had clear expectations in the immediate days before, but I agree with what Matt said about the strikingness of the result if you look at it from a historical perspective.

The one qualification I would put to that is it was pretty clear, I think, once I'm in last year, was the CDU CSU candidate for Chancellor, that he was a pretty poor candidate, and that the CDU were taking from their point of view, an enormous risk in having him as the Chancellor Canada.

And obviously there'd been quite a lot of resistance within the party and alternative candidates have put themselves forward.

So if you look at it from the perspective of would you expect a long incumbent party losing its long standing Chancellor Canada, and putting in her place someone who didn't look very good at campaigning and was unpopular within his own party to do well, I think you'd say no, you wouldn't.

...