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

Mrs Merkel earlier urged her party to celebrate "a super result" after exit polls suggested she was set to win a historic third term.

Her Christian Democrats (CDU) bloc took about 42% of the vote.

But she might yet have to seek a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) who won about 26% of the vote.

Mrs Merkel`s preferred liberal partners have not made it into parliament.

The results showed that the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won only 4.8%, which correspondents say is a disaster for the junior coalition partner, leaving it with no national representation in parliament for the first time in Germany`s post-war history.

Party chairman Philipp Roesler called it "the bitterest, saddest hour of the Free Democratic Party".

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.

There was at one point speculation on German television that Mrs Merkel`s CDU and their Bavarian sister CSU might even win enough seats for an absolute majority - the first in half a century.

Source: BBC
BDST: 0915 HRS, SEP 23, 2013
AKA/BSK