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Germany’s Social Democrats said Sunday they will not continue governing in a ‘grand coalition’ with Angela Merkel’s conservatives after projections showed they had scored their worst general election result in post-war history.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been re-elected for a fourth term in federal elections, exit polls suggest. Her conservative CDU/CSU alliance has won 32.5% of the vote, remaining the largest party in Germany's parliament, according to the ARD poll.

Thread for German Election: Polls close - first projections Polls have closed. The first ARD projection by Infratest dimap is: CDU/CSU: 32.5 SPD: 20 AfD: 13.5 FDP: 10.5 Green: 9.5 Left: 9

A poll published by public broadcaster ZDF on Friday shows that both the major parties are likely to suffer major losses, while the small right-wing parties are on the rise. The ZDF Politikbarometer poll shows Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) on 36 percent support, with the Social Democrats (SPD) on a miserable 21.5 percent. Germany’s two largest parties have been united in a “grand coalition” since 2013, a fact which appears to have led to an erosion in support for both of them. If the ZDF figures are accurate, Merkel’s party will suffer a 5.5 percent drop in the vote....

The ex-Goldman Sachs banker and lesbian mother is one of the top two candidates for the anti-immigrant Eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The sharply dressed blonde is pitting herself against Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in Europe, ahead of the German election on Sunday. Alice Weidel, 38, may have no hope of beating Mrs Merkel, but she has helped to put the migrant crisis at the heart of the election debate. The openly gay politician has a doctorate in economics, has a home in Switzerland, lived in China for years and is trying to soften the image of...

WISMAR, Germany—Candidate Georg Pazderski of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany spent nearly half his speech in this harbor town earlier this week highlighting the danger of Islamist terrorism. Chancellor Angela Merkel dispatched the topic in roughly 80 seconds in an address here the next day. As this country’s election campaign reaches its crescendo ahead of Sunday’s vote, its participants appear to be fighting different battles. Ms. Merkel, looking assured of victory, is engaging her opponents in mainstream parties on pensions, infrastructure, education, and economic policy. The Alternative for Germany is creeping up in the polls while positioning itself as the...

A report written by the German parliament’s legal experts has found that parliament and not Angela Merkel should have decided on opening Germany’s borders to refugees in September 2015. The report by the Bundestag Scientific Office, a team of non-partisan legal experts, stated that it is the role of the Bundestag (German parliament) to decide on all matters of essential relevance to the state. In the document, the main findings of which were published by Die Welt on Friday, the experts do not explicitly say that the decision made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on September 4th 2015 to take...

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel warned against “national selfishness” in world politics on Thursday in his first speech at the United Nations General Assembly. “This worldview describes the world as an arena, a kind of battleground, in which everyone is fighting against everyone else and in which everyone has to assert their own interests, either alone or in alliances of convenience,” Gabriel told world leaders. “The motto ‘Our country first’ only leads to more national confrontations and less prosperity. In the end, there will only be losers,” he said, in a thinly veiled reference to US President Donald Trump’s oft-repeated...

HOW OTHERS SEE IT   The anti-immigration AfD party is set for its best-ever national election Sunday, largely due to its popularity in the former East Germany. There, voters say they were left behind during reunification – and resent efforts to integrate immigrants while they still feel like second-class citizens. GROSSDUBRAU, GERMANY—“Traitor!” “Merkel, out!” The anger, boos, and whistles greeting Angela Merkel in Germany’s east earlier this month are not the sort of reception many outside observers expect the country’s popular chancellor to receive. But not so for people like Regina Bernstein, who lives near this small village of 4,200...

For decades, in both America and Europe, the gay establishment – gay magazines, gay rights organizations, and self-designated gay leaders – have been dictating politics to the gay multitudes. Those politics have been consistently left-wing and Democratic. Not all gays have played follow-the-leader, but most have, so that in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections Hillary Clinton won a far larger percentage of the gay vote than Donald Trump. Even though Hillary had opposed same-sex marriage until 2013, had taken millions of dollars from governments that execute homosexuals, and was married to the man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act,...

It's promising to observe that as Islam plants its roots ever more deeply in the soil of Western Europe, more and more European gays are wising up, breaking ranks with the fools and liars in their midst who preach that the “gay community” and the ummah are natural allies, and casting their ballots for politicians whom they'd previously scorned. In April, for example, Thomas Adamson of the Associated Press reported that although gay rights groups in France had not wavered in their fierce opposition to Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN), the party now enjoyed a higher level of support...

Last Wednesday the Bavarian interior ministry released statistics that made for sobering reading. In the first half of 2017 some 685 sex crimes were recorded in Bavaria, a rise of 48 percent on the same period in 2016. Of these crimes, 126 had suspects who had arrived in Germany as asylum seekers. The figures showed that sex crimes with asylum seekers as suspects jumped by 91 percent in a year. While the large majority (71 percent) of suspects were Germans, people who had come to the country seeking asylum made up 11 percent of all suspects, a figure disproportionate to...

The first time Donald Trump met Angela Merkel, pictures of their awkward non-handshake in the Oval Office went around the world — and the months that followed did little to break the ice. But if the 63-year-old chancellor sails her way — as widely predicted — to a fourth term in Sunday’s legislative elections, the leaders of the United States and Germany will have to figure out a way to work together in the long term. Pretty much everything about “Mutti,” as Europe’s most influential leader is known at home, sets her apart from the 71-year-old occupant of the White...

Two Afghan asylum seekers were arrested for the brutal rape, and a third for attempted rape, of a 16-year-old girl in the Bavarian town of Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn just south of Munich. The pair of asylum seekers, aged 27 and 17, are said to have met the girl on Friday night along with others who gathered in front of a local asylum shelter. The pair, along with an 18-year-old Afghan male, walked the girl to a nearby train station where the 27-year-old and 17-year-old took turns raping her, Der Spiegel reports. The 18-year-old Afghan asylum seeker also attempted to rape the girl...

Germany is on the verge of striking a $2 billion deal for five new Braunschweig-class corvettes that would improve its capabilities and help meet NATO defense spending commitments. Parliament approved the funds for the vessels in June, and the German navy expects to receive the ships by 2025. They will each be equipped with a 76 mm main gun and surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, as well as mines. The navy already has five ships of the same class, but the German defense procurement agency, BAAINBw, said in a statement announcing the deal that the new arrivals would help Germany meet...

Over the past week, 20 polling stations set up in central Berlin invited non-German citizens to cast a symbolic general election vote. Why is the right to vote important for these residents? The Local found out. “I find it bad that I’m not able to vote,” Ania Seroka explained after she slipped her symbolic ballot into the box with her young son by her side. In spite of having lived in Germany for ten years, Polish citizen Ania Seroka will not have a say in the country’s federal election less than a week away. But the social worker considers her...

BERLIN — Americans can be forgiven for thinking Germany has already successfully thwarted Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Deutsch version of the right-wing populist movements pounding on the gates of Europe. When the overtly racist AfD’s numbers sank in the polls in March, observers across the West felt relieved to know that the European Union’s backbone and strongest advocate would not fall to the far right. Germans, however, feel little such relief. In fact, many are worried sick about the virtual certainty of a far-right party’s entrance to Parliament. That’s because even a small AfD presence in the Bundestag could...

During a meet-the-voter TV show on Thursday night, a cleaning lady asked Chancellor Angela Merkel a question that raised the issue of old-age poverty — leaving her struggling to come up with an answer. “In Austria, there is a citizens’ insurance scheme. Everyone pays into it,” Petra Vogel told the Chancellor on a live show on public broadcaster ZDF on Thursday. Vogel, a cleaner in a hospital in Bochum and trade unionist, went on to explain that if Germany had this too, she would not have to live in poverty as a pensioner. After more than 40 years of work,...

Germans should be proud of what their soldiers achieved during the first and second world wars, the top candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has said in the run-up to elections on 24 September at which the party is expected to enter parliament.

ZITiS is a serious investment: some 10 million euros ($12 million) will be poured into the new agency in the first year alone, with 120 positions created immediately. The government wants to expand that workforce to 400 by 2022. It is designed to be a technological resource for Germany's other security agencies, all of which come under the authority of the Interior Ministry.