The leader of Germany’s center-right conservative Christian democrats pledged to work toward a quick formation of a government, after his party came out in the lead of the snap parliamentary elections, with a 28.5% share of the vote according to exit polls.
The turnout at the polls is estimated at a record-breaking 83-84%.
According to the exit poll conducted for the ZDF public media broadcaster, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) along with its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), are projected to take between 187 and 209 seats in the 630-seat parliament, well short of the 316 needed for a majority, necessitating that the Christian democrats begin to look for coalition partners.
Although forming a government majority in the fractured parliament might be tricky, Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, said that he intends to form a government as soon as possible.
He said: “The world won’t wait for us, it won’t wait for long drawn-out coalition negotiations. We must be capable of acting again swiftly so that we can do the right thing in Germany, so that we are present again in Europe and so that the world sees: Germany has a reliable government again.”
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in second, with 20% of the vote and between 131 and 146 projected seats, with most of its support concentrated in former communist East Germany.
AfD Leader Alice Weidel implied in her post-election speech that it was only a matter of time before that changed.
“Our hand remains outstretched to form a government,” she told supporters, adding that it would be tantamount to “electoral fraud” if the first-placed conservatives chose to govern with left-wing parties rather than them.
If that happened, she said, “next time we’ll come first,” and that AfD is now “a mainstream party.”
Once internationally isolated, it now has an ally in the White House, where Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, regularly posts his support.
Although the AfD campaigned on a harsher anti-immigration policy, as did CDU/CSU, all mainstream parties have pledged not to ally themselves with the right-wing radicals.
The center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) of the incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz came in third, with 16.5% of the vote and between 108 and 121 projected seats.
While Scholz congratulated the conservative leader Friedrich Merz on the latter’s party’s victory, defense minister and Scholz’s fellow party member Boris Pistorius called the election result catastrophic for the social democrats and said that it was now about democrats sticking together.
“This is a devastating, catastrophic result,” he said in an interview with Germany’s other public broadcaster, ARD. Asked about his own future, he said it was on the party to decide what’s next.
SPD’s coalition partner, the Greens, received 12% of the vote and are expected to get between 79 and 88 seats.
The Left, a socialist party with support based mainly in former East Germany, won 9% of the vote and is expected to take between 59 and 66 seats.
Exit polls show that the pro-Russian left-wing but socially conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the mainstream liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) both teeter on the 5% electoral threshold.
If either one or both fall below it, it will boost the number of seats allocated to the other five parties. If both manage to cross the threshold, they get around 33 MPs, a projection by ZDF suggests.
As votes are being counted, however, it appears increasingly more likely that neither BSW nor FDP will not cross the 5% threshold. It is also not likely they will win at least three of the 299 single-constituency seats, which would entitle them to get a share of the proportionally apportioned seats regardless of the threshold.
The party representing the Frisian and Danish national minorities concentrated in the northern federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is expected to win one single-constituency seat.
