Dear Reader,

In the end, who becomes the next mayor of Berlin could be decided by as few as 140 votes.

That’s not because the race for first in Sunday’s state election was tight. On a day when voter turnout was low, the CDU won with an unexpectedly large share of 28 percent. The SPD and Green were way behind on 18 percent.

But 140 is the number of additional votes the Social Democrats won compared to the Greens to secure second place by the most wafer-thin of margins in a city with 2.5 million eligible voters.

That number matters because it might just give the incumbent mayor, Franziska Giffey, the authority to keep ruling at the head of the ‘red-green-red’ coalition that had been in power for just over a year when the last election was annulled.

That coalition lost a large number of votes to the CDU and, more importantly, to ‘it’s too cold to go and vote today’. But it would still have a workable majority.

Some would say that losing a vote by ten percenta…