Merkel's party leads in state vote: exit poll
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E-mail Xinhua, March 26, 2012
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party started this year's regional election series with a blowout victory in the state of Saarland, while its junior partner in the federal coalition failed to change its destiny and suffered another kick-out, exit polls showed Sunday.
Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) garnered 34.5 percent of the vote, ahead of its main rival Social Democrats (SPD) with some three percentage points, in the regional election of Saarland, a small state with one million people on the French border, exit polls released by German public television ARD and ZDF showed.
In line with expectation, the Free Democrats (FDP), junior partner in Merkel's federal government, failed to preserve its seats in the Saarland parliament by collecting only 1.5 percent, far below the threshold of five percent for entering parliament.
This is the sixth state election that the FDP was voted out of since 2011. Experts said that the result was clearly a blow to Merkel's current coalition and has forced the chancellor to rethink her future partner when she is pursuing the third term next year.
Saarland's CDU governor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is expected to retain her post and form a "grand coalition" with the center-left SPD after Sunday's election, as the SPD has ruled out earlier that it would form a coalition with the Left Party, which won the third place with about 16.1 percent of the vote.
Kramp-Karrenbauer called the snap election in January, two years ahead of schedule, after the state's three-way coalition, including the CDU, the FDP and the Greens, collapsed.
The Green secured about five percent this time, much enough for them to have seats in the parliament, while the Pirates, a rising star in Germany's political arena since last September which advocates transparency and Internet freedom, achieved its second entry in a state parliament with around 7.5 percent.
All eyes are now on the upcoming elections of the country-- Schleswig-Holstein state votes in May 6 and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, in May 13, all of which are expected to deliver voters' key opinions for the federal election due in late 2013.
