"Angela Merkel's conservatives won a stunning victory in Sunday's general election, sharply increasing their share of the vote by some eight points to around 42 percent and putting her on track for a third term.It's the best result for the conservatives since the heady days of 1990, when Germans handed then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel's former mentor, his third term in a wave of gratitude for his role in reunifying the nation.
Merkel's junior coalition party, the pro-business Free Democratic Party crashed out of parliament according TV based projections which put them below the 5% needed for parliamentary representation.
"We can already celebrate today because we did great," a beaming Merkel, 59, told ecstatic supporters at the CDU's headquarters in Berlin.
If her conservatives have indeed won an absolute majority, and that is beginning to look unlikely as more results come in, she will face the prospect of governing with a wafer-thin majority of seats and a hostile upper house of parliament with the power to block her policies.
If the conservatives have fallen just short of a majority, they will need to find a coalition partner, the most likely candidate being the center-left Social Democratic Party , which will want to extract the highest possible price for its cooperation in a so-called grand coalition, both in terms of cabinet posts and policy concessions.
The prize, however, would be a left-right government with an overwhelming majority in both houses of parliament. She wouldn't have to worry about backbench rebellions against upcoming euro bailouts or domestic reforms, which she will finally have to address after years of postponement.
The SPD was at around 25.5 percent, up slightly from 23.0 percent in 2009, according to projections. The Greens were at just over eight percent, down from 10.7 percent in 2009.
The anti-euro Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which was formed in February and calls for an "orderly dismantling of the euro zone," came close to the five percent threshold. Public broadcaster ARD had them at 4.8 percent and ZDF at 4.9 percent in election night projections".
Source: Spiegel International
