political life as negotiations to form a new government collapse. the breakdown in talks raising the prospect of new elections just two months after the last election seemed to guarantee merkel a fourth term. let's go live to berlin and bring in cnn's atika shubert. bring us up to speed on what's happening there. >> reporter: well, at the moment, what's happening is that the president, walter steinmeier, it's his job to kind of find a way out of this political dilemma, and he's saying, look, everybody, get your act together, get back to the negotiating table. he's going to meet with the different coalition -- or potential coalition partners who walked out. the fdp, the free democrats and the greens. and he's going to hope that somehow they can cobble together some sort of agreement to move forward. however, it's not at all clear that any of the parties want to continue this way. in fact, chancellor merkel herself has said, you know, she doesn't want to see a minority government, and if talks don't work, she'd rather see a new election. so that means what we could be seeing is elections in the