Summary Merkel's Union bloc scored its best result in 23 years Sunday to put her on course for a third term.
BERLIN (AP) Chancellor Angela Merkel won a stunning victory in Germany s elections, but she still faces the delicate work of forming a coalition government. She and top party officials were meeting Monday to talk strategy about reaching out to the center-left rivals they need to form a government.
Merkel s Union bloc scored its best result in 23 years Sunday to put her on course for a third term, winning 41.5 percent of the vote and finishing only five seats short of an absolute majority in the lower house. However, Merkel s coalition partner crashed out of Parliament.
Merkel looks likely to end up leading either a "grand coalition" government with the center-left Social Democrats of defeated challenger Peer Steinbrueck reviving the alliance that ran Germany in her first term or, less likely, with the environmentalist Greens.
"We have two possibilities: the Social Democrats or the Greens," Volker Kauder, the leader of her party s parliamentary group, told ARD public Television. "We will determine in our committees how the talks should go."
"We will provide our country with a strong government," Kauder added before heading into the talks.
Markets were fairly subdued in their response to the election results given the likely haggling over the formation of a government in the coming days. The DAX index of leading shares was down 0.1 percent at 8,663.
"The formation of a government is not straightforward at all," said Peter Schaffrik, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "If finding a new government takes too long, markets might get jumpy as regards the stability of the German government, particularly with key European issues coming up for a negotiation."
Merkel s coalition partners in the last government, the pro-business Free Democrats, won only 4.8 percent of the vote.
They fell short of the 5 percent needed to win seats in Parliament for the first time in Germany s post-World War II history, paying the price for frequent government infighting and their failure to secure the tax cuts they pledged before going into government four years ago.
"We don t know what the chancellor will do at this point," Kauder said. "She has the mandate to build a new government."
Several weeks of negotiations are expected, whether Merkel forms a coalition with the Social Democrats or with the Greens.
Merkel s conservatives finished far ahead of Steinbrueck s Social Democrats, who won 25.7 percent of the vote not much better than the post-war low of 23 percent they hit four years ago.
Their Green allies polled a disappointing 8.4 percent, while the hard-line Left Party scored 8.6 percent. Although the three parties on the left together hold a thin parliamentary majority, there s virtually no chance of their governing together.
