Alice Weidel is the leader of the AfD (Image: Getty)
Far-right party appears to have nearly doubled the votes it secured during the 2021 German election. The first exit polls, released by broadcaster ARD just minutes after the voting ended, suggest the party got around 19.5% of the vote in the country’s snap election on Sunday.
This result, albeit lower than expected, if confirmed would mark a watershed moment in Germany’s postwar politics, as the far-right storms back on to the country’s national political stage. Exit polls, however, are not definitive and only mark the earliest indication of how the voting has gone.
Germany and the world are not expected to learn who has won the German election for several hours.
The exit polls also suggest that the centre-right CDU/CSU got 29% of the votes, making its leader a clear favourite for the position of Chancellor.
The SPD, led by Olaf Scholz, appears to be on course to receive 16% of the votes, while the Greens got 13.5% of the votes, according to the first exit polls. The Left followed in the first projections, with 8.5%.
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Friedrich Merz hailed his “historic win” but acknowledged he faced a diffcult task ahead to transform the country’s economic and social forunes.
However, he insisted he was confident of being able “to create a government capable of acting in Germany’s interest” soon.
“Everybody in the world sees that Germany has a reliable and trustworthy government,” he said, adding that “now we can also actually party here. Tonight we will be celebrating and as of tomorrow we will be resuming our work.”
First projections suggest the CDU and its sister CSU party will get 211 seats in the the new parllaiment and is likely to form a coalition government with Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.
The AfD said it now had a manadte to bring about political change in the country, after securing second place in Sunday’s vote.
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Standing alongside Alice Weidel at the party’s HQ, the AfD’s co-chairman Tino Chrupalla said: “We can really bring about a epochal change, we are always open to negotiations”.
He added: “We have received the confidence of the voters and that should be something everybody else accepts as well.”
Millions of Germans cast their vote today, only weeks after SPD leader Mr Scholz announced a snap election in the wake of the collapse of the government coalition he led since 2021.
In the run-up to today’s vote, pollsters had regularly shown the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) clearly in the lead, making the first projections a somewhat expected result.
But the story dominating the news cycle has been for weeks the massive surge seen in opinion polls of the anti-immigration AfD, led by Alice Weidel.
Pollsters including YouGov and Politico’s Poll of Polls suggested in past days Ms Weidel’s party would receive 20% of the vote – roughly double the 10% won by the AfD the last time Germans headed to the voting booths for a federal election.
A similar surge in support of the AfD five months after the party celebrated what it called a “historic success” at the local election in Thuringia.
In September, the far-right party won almost a third of the vote, finishing nine points ahead of the CDU. This marked a far-right victory in a state parliament election in Germany since World War 2.
No matter the results of today’s federal election, the AfD is not expected to be able to enter government, as all the other major parties have vowed not to enter a coalition with the far-right.