Voters under 30 preferred the Greens on the left (22%) and the libertarian FDP (20%) on the right by a wide margin, according to this exit poll from Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.
In contrast, the over-60s voted for the centre left (35%) and centre right (34%). Only 9% went for the Greens and 8% for the FDP.
But because most of the electorate is older, the big-tent parties of the left and right came out ahead.
At 735 seats, this German parliament looks set to be the biggest ever. But because of the German electoral system, no one - not even the election authorities - knew just how big it would be.
The top candidate in each constituency gets a seat: there are 299 of them. A further 299 seats are reserved for the party lists in the 16 federal states, or Bundesländer. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference.
But that’s only 598, so where do the extra 137 seats come from?
This is where second-preference votes come into play, based on the population in each states and how many votes go to the second-placed party in each.
Confused yet? You should be.
Parties need to clear the 5% minimum vote share, or win three constituency seats, in order to enter parliament.
This is how the far-left party, Die Linke, only narrowly scraped in. Its share of the vote fell by almost half from the last elections, in 2017, from 9.2% to 4.9%.
However, the three constituencies it won, in Berlin and Leipzig, saved it from political oblivion at federal level.