LONDON — Chancellor Angela Merkel won a decisive second term Sunday in elections that could shunt Germany’s government to the right, initial returns and exit polls showed.
With ballots being counted into the night, projections by the nation’s public television broadcasters put Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats on track to pull in about one-third of the votes. The contest was almost unanimously criticized by commentators as dull and uninspiring.
As a plus for Merkel, the apparent strong third-place showing by the small libertarian Free Democrats, projected to win 15 percent of the vote, should allow her to rule in coalition with the pro-business party and to pursue an agenda of lower taxes and labor reform.
That would bring an end to the awkward government of the past four years, which yoked the Christian Democrats, or CDU, with their archrivals, the left-of-center Social Democrats, in a “grand coalition.”
For the Social Democrats, the election brought a humiliating defeat as the party plunged to its worst performance since World War II.
The party garnered less than one-quarter of the vote, according to initial returns and exit polls. The rout almost certainly will propel it out of the coalition government for the first time in 11 years.
Although Merkel was lambasted by political watchers for running a soporific campaign almost devoid of substantive debate, she held on to her high personal-approval ratings to win re-election as Germany’s first-ever female leader.
She said she would initiate talks with the Free Democrats about forming a center-right coalition.
Crucial for the U.S., a new center-right coalition probably will be steelier in its continued commitment of troops to the war in Afghanistan, a deeply unpopular undertaking in Germany.
