THIS post will attempt to avoid earthquake, tsunami or nuclear metaphors in discussing the effects of the Japanese catastrophe on Germany, but it will not be easy. Those effects have been sudden and dramatic, both for politics and for policy. Germany is hypersensitive to nuclear peril even at the calmest of times. Its reliance on nuclear power is not great: 17 plants account for around a quarter of electricity generation (see chart). France's 58 plants, by contrast, produce three quarters of the country's electricity.

Yet Germany's anti-nuclear movement is lively. The transport of nuclear waste provokes angry blockades; on Saturday, after the Japanese disaster, more than 100,000 people demonstrated against nuclear power across Germany (see picture). Ordinary voters are suspicious of nuclear power. Outright hostility was a driving force in the rise of the opposition Green party.

So it was a bold move for Angela Merkel's “Christian-liberal” coalition to decide last autumn to overturn a plan enacted by a previous government to end nuclear-power generation in Germany by 2022. The plants, the government decreed, would be allowed to operate 12 years longer on average. This was part of a broader energy plan meant to boost conservation, improve energy security and move toward reliance on renewable sources of electricity. No one dared to suggest building new nuclear plants. But it seemed a pity to shut down depreciated plants producing cheap, climate-friendly electricity well before the end of their useful life.

Now, with the Fukushima plant spewing radioactivity, Mrs Merkel's courage has failed. Yesterday she announced that the government would enact a three-month “moratorium” on its plan to extend the operating life of nuclear plants. Today she said that seven plants built before 1980 would be shut down temporarily. Some will probably not reopen. The Japanese disaster is a “turning point in the history of the industrial world,” she said. (There is no sign, though, that a new tax slapped on the nuclear-power companies last year will be scrapped.)

Mrs Merkel's decision has much to do with politics, though her allies stoutly deny it. Three of Germany's 16 states are holding elections this month: Saxony-Anhalt this Sunday and Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate the following Sunday. The stakes are especially high in Baden-Württemberg, which has been governed by Mrs Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for more than half a century. A loss would be a disaster for her.

Pre-tsunami, the CDU and its coalition partner in Baden-Württemberg, the Free Democratic Party (which is also part of Mrs Merkel's government) had been narrowly ahead of the Social Democrats and the Greens. But Stefan Mappus, the state's premier, is one of the CDU's loudest advocates of nuclear power; he wanted an even longer extension of the nuclear operating deadline (and when Mrs Merkel's environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, resisted, hinted that he should resign). Post-tsunami, Mr Mappus's enthusiasm for fission looked politically dangerous. Hence Mrs Merkel's hasty retreat from the nuclear-deadline extension.

The opposition has been quick to accuse Mrs Merkel of trickery: won't she go back to her pro-nuclear ways after the moratorium expires and the elections are safely out of the way? Probably not. Mrs Merkel knows that German nukes are no more dangerous now than they were before the Fukushima explosions. A trained physicist, when asked why her assessment of the risk has suddenly changed, she squirms. But she also knows that the political risks have risen, probably for good. That means that the government will have to come up with a new energy policy that reassures voters without driving up costs or jeopardising its ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions. Germany may thus be in the market for a new “bridge” technology. Perhaps it will be gas.