Confirmed: Merkel's Party Wins, Falls Short of Absolute Majority

World | September 23, 2013, Monday // 08:10
Bulgaria: Confirmed: Merkel's Party Wins, Falls Short of Absolute Majority German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photo by EPA/BGNES

Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party has expectedly won Germany's election, but finished just short of an absolute majority, official results show.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) bloc took about 42% of the vote. However, her preferred liberal partners failed to overcome the election threshold. The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won only 4.8%, leaving it with no national representation in parliament for the first time in Germany's post-war history.

The FDP was beaten by the Green Party (8.4%) and the former communist Left Party (8.6%), and even the new Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), which advocates withdrawal from the euro currency and took about 4.7%, just short of the parliamentary threshold, the BBC informs.

Merkel’s party may have to seek a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) who won about 26% of the vote.

The last such grand coalition was led by Merkel from 2005 to 2009, but it took 65 days to negotiate before reaching agreement.

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Tags: German elections, Angela Merkel, general election, Bundestag, grand coalition

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