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Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was celebrating its historic third place success last night, having secured 13% of the vote, according to exit polls, marking the first time in almost six decades that an openly nationalist party will enter the Bundestag.
Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrat-led alliance secured 33% of the vote, according to exit polls, about 12 points ahead of her main rivals, Martin Schulz’s centre-left Social Democrats, which secured around 21 points, marking the poorest result for Germany’s oldest party since 1949 and pushing it on to the opposition benches. [...]
AfD will become the third largest party and is on course to occupy 88 seats in the Bundestag, compared with 217 for the CDU/CSU and 137 for the the SPD.
Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s top candidate, reacted immediately to the news. Addressing euphoric party members at the party’s Berlin headquarters, he said: “This is a great day for our party political history. We are entering the Bundestag for the first time and we will change this country.”
He said the AfD would “hunt” Merkel over her refugee policy, renewing his party’s calls during the campaign for a parliamentary committee to examine the legal grounds on which she opened Germany’s borders during the refugee crisis of 2015. He added: “We will take our people and our country back.” [...]
The country faces weeks of drawn-out coalition talks between the parties, about who will form a government with the CDU/CSU.
A repeat of the so-called “grand coalition” between Merkel’s conservative alliance and the SPD would amount to 354 seats – 316 are required to form a government – but was vehemently ruled out by Schulz, who in Sunday night’s post-result TV debate called Merkel’s election tactics “scandalous” and accused her of creating the political vacuum that was filled by AfD.
A second option is a “Jamaica alliance” – so called because the parties’ colours make up the Jamaican flag – between the CDU/CSU, the resurrected Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens, which would have 356 seats. But the constellation has never been tried in the national parliament before and is fraught with potential difficulty, not least a clash over environmental issues between the FDP and Greens and resistance in the FDP towards eurozone changes proposed by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, to which Merkel has given her backing. [...]
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