BOTH Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Europe as a whole avoided disaster today. As expected, the Bundestag, Germany's lower house, voted with a thumping majority to expand the powers of the €440 billion ($598 billion) European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the main fund for bailing out indebted euro countries.

Four of the five parties in the Bundestag, including the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, backed the measure (the ex-communist Left Party was the exception). The vote suggests that, whatever German voters may think, the political class is still prepared to use Germany's economic muscle to back the single currency. Had the vote gone against the EFSF, a financial-market meltdown might well have been the result.

Yet the opposition's support meant that that was never a realistic outcome. The vote passed by 523 votes for to 85 against, with three abstentions. The cliff-hanger question was whether rebellious deputies from Mrs Merkel's coalition would force her to rely on opposition support to win the vote.

Scepticism about the ever-mounting cost of euro bailouts is rising within the coalition, which consists of Mrs Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP).

Had the doubters denied Mrs Merkel her so called "chancellor's majority", forcing her to rely on opposition votes, she would have been gravely wounded. Her government is already demoralised by tensions among its members, slumping poll ratings and the strain of the euro crisis. The chancellor needed to show that she could rally her allies in support of her most important policy.

In the end, she did—just. To win a "chancellor's majority" she needed the support of 311 of her 330 deputies (the Bundestag has 620 seats). Preliminary counts suggest that 315 of them voted for the EFSF. Mrs Merkel could have lost a few more votes without severe damage: an “own majority”, meaning coalition votes in favour of the EFSF outnumbering the number of opposition deputies present and voting, would probably have sufficed to avoid humiliation.

But the EFSF vote is likely not to be the last time the Bundestag is brought to the euro-brink this year. The house will take up a proposed second bail-out of Greece (probably in October, if Greece does not default before then). Early next year it will vote on the permanent successor to the EFSF, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

“With each new vote on the widening of the euro-rescue package, there will be more 'No' votes,” says Frank Schäffler, a rebellious FDP deputy, who may well force his own party to hold a referendum on the ESM among its members.

Attention is already shifting to the question of whether Germany will back rescue measures that have yet even to be put on paper. Few believe that the EFSF and the ESM together will be enough to stabilise the euro. Rumours abound of schemes to increase the firepower of the EFSF by expanding its ability to borrow, perhaps from the European Central Bank.

Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's Europhile finance minister, vows that the EFSF will not be topped up, but it is not clear that he is ruling out all forms of reinforcement. Whatever happens, he promises that the Bundestag will have its say.

But leading figures in the coalition are already making it clear that they are not to be pushed further. Today's vote commits Germany to back the fund with €211 billion in guarantees. This week Standard & Poor's, a ratings agency, warned that Germany could be downgraded if the EFSF were expanded further.

This shocked already-skittish Germans. “If Germany is downgraded, that is the end,” said the CSU's leader, Horst Seehofer, a persistent irritant to Mrs Merkel. The CSU will not support further extensions of the euro-rescue scheme, the Bavarian leader told Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper. “This far, and no further,” he declared. But it will be up to the markets to decide whether Germany has gone far enough.