German Elections

The German election is too close to call. ABC is reporting that exit polls show Angie Merkel winning, but Shroeder refuses to concede. Both sides are claiming victory.

Exit polls showed conservative challenger Angela Merkel's party leading in German parliamentary elections Sunday but falling short of the majority she needed to form a center-right coalition as the nation's first female chancellor.

Gerhard Schroeder, written off as a lame duck a few weeks ago, finished stronger than expected and refused to concede defeat, saying he could still theoretically remain in power if talks with other parties were successful.

Read it here.

Deutsch Welle's analysis:

Experts... say the only possibility would be a so-called "traffic light" coalition with the SPD, Greens and the free-market liberal FDP, which surprised everyone by garnering 10.1 percent of the vote.

FDP leaders, however, said they would rather stay in opposition than join a government with Schröder and the Greens.

"We don't have the majority for the innovative, necessary reforms needed to change our country," said FDP deputy leader Wolfgang Gerhardt. "That holds us up and it holds the country up."

For weeks, the CDU and FDP had been planning a coalition government that would take an aggressive approach to trimming Germany's bloated welfare system and reforming the labor market to encourage investment and growth. With the CDU only winning 35.5 percent of the vote, such a coalition is now impossible.

"While Germans understand that they need fundamental economic reform, if they want to tackle unemployment, they don't want radical economic reform and don't want to give up their benefits," said Karen Donfried, senior director of the German Marshall Fund in Washington D.C. in an interview with DW-WORLD. "I think Schröder was able to play very well off of that."

CDU leader Angela Merkel said her party, after claiming the majority share of the vote, has been given the job of forming a government. But her options are just as limited after an election night that surprised many Germans.

Read it here.

Updated information here [with nice graphics].

UPDATE:

Almost final results from AP:

With 298 of 299 districts declaring, the results showed Merkel's Christian Democrats party with 35.2 percent of the vote compared to 34.3 percent for Schroeder's Social Democrats. Voting in the final district, Dresden, was delayed until Oct. 2 because of the death of a candidate. But that outcome was not expected to affect the final result.

Merkel's party won 225 seats, three more than the Social Democrats; the Free Democrats got 61, the Left Party 54 and the Greens 51. Germany's legislature has at least 598 seats — but often more — elected under proportional representation from party lists. The outgoing parliament, for example, has 601 lawmakers.

Merkel's preferred coalition partners — the pro-business Free Democrats — had 9.8 percent, leaving such an alliance short of outright victory. The Greens, the Social Democrats' current governing partner, had 8.1 percent; together, the two parties failed to reach a majority, ending Schroeder's government.

The Left Party had 8.7 percent of the vote, but Schroeder said he would not work with them. The overall election turnout was 77.7 percent.

Both Merkel and Schroeder said they would talk to all parties except the new Left Party, a combination of ex-communists and renegade Social Democrats.

Read here.