As I said goodbye to Berlin last Saturday, the city’s postmodern architectural monuments gleamed in the sun, outshining the field-gray facades of the old Prussian capital. On the eve of what proved to be a crushing defeat for Germany’s ruling coalition in the country’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, I watched Chancellor Schroeder making his last bid to stay in power.

His party, the Social Democrats, had fought a bad campaign: It succeeded in alienating both business and labor unions, comparing “capitalists” to “locusts” while simultaneously warning blue-collar workers of even greater unemployment to come. More than a million Germans are already jobless in North Rhine-Westphalia alone, and there are 5 million altogether. Things haven’t been this bad since the end of the Weimar Republic. After seven years in power, Mr. Schroeder has run out of excuses.

So what did he fall back on? In his speech Mr. Schroeder’s favorite word was “Deutschland.” He got a big cheer every time he resorted to patriotic populism last week. No sooner had the results of the election been announced – the Red-Green coalition had lost Germany’s industrial heartland and with it any hope of governing effectively – than the chancellor was at it again. In a dramatic press conference, Mr. Schroeder called on the president to bring forward next year’s federal election to this fall, thereby making a great show of placing the national interest before that of his party. By wrapping himself in the black-red-gold flag of constitutional patriotism, Mr. Schroeder is gambling that he could still win an early election against the odds, just as he did last time.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Dr. Samuel Johnson said. The great man did not, of course, mean that all patriots were scoundrels, but that a scoundrel with nowhere else to go would sooner or later seek to exploit national pride. Mr. Schroeder was in 2002 the first postwar German chancellor to fight and win an election on an anti-American ticket. He whipped up a mood of inverted jingoism over the impending war in Iraq, which tapped into deep-seated German resentment of America and intimidated the Christian Democrat opposition, which failed to make the Atlanticist case. The following year, when it came to the crunch at the United Nations, Mr. Schroeder lined up with Presidents Chirac and Putin against President Bush and his one-time friend Tony Blair. Mr. Schroeder’s legacy is to have made anti-Americanism respectable in a nation that values respectability above all things. It is a genie that is unlikely to be rebottled any time soon.

Whether that makes Mr. Schroeder a scoundrel or not is a matter of taste, but it is worth recalling that his generation – the student rebels of the 1960s who now rule the roost all over Europe – was the most fortunate in living memory. Instead of war and dictatorship, inflation and depression, expropriation and expulsion, the Germans of Mr. Schroeder’s generation had only one demon to grapple with: vicarious guilt.

Mr. Schroeder never knew his father, who was killed on the Russian front before even setting eyes on his infant son. The son’s response to the sins of his own and his cohort’s fathers was to punish them. Like his chief allies, foreign minister Joschka Fischer and interior minister Otto Schily, young Gerhard identified not with Germany’s fragile new democracy and the free world that had created it, but with the enemies of democracy – the Baader-Meinhof terrorists – and the Marxist enemies of the free world. Though Messrs. Schroeder, Fischer, and Schily grew out of their youthful follies, dumped their less flexible friends, and are now the targets of similar patricidal rebellions, their only substitute, the ersatz ideology of the “United States of Europe,” is now scarcely less bankrupt than Marxism.

If, as is more than likely, national elections are brought forward to this fall, Mr. Schroeder may be tempted to echo the tactics that brought him victory in 2002. He may denounce any attempt by the Bush administration to coerce Iran and other rogue states. Or he may make an issue out of lifting the Chinese arms embargo, perhaps provoking a spat with the White House in order to burnish his anti-American credentials. It may be significant that sitting alongside the chancellor at his speech last Friday was none other than the prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The beneficiary of last year’s Madrid bombings, Mr. Zapatero was the surprise victor over the pro-American Jose Maria Aznar, and promptly pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. If Mr. Schroeder is listening to Mr. Zapatero’s advice on how to get re-elected, then we can expect a very ugly German election indeed.