Germany’s Merkel wins first election-year test

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party scored a convincing victory over their centre-left rivals in a state poll Sunday seen as the first test ahead of national elections.   

The Christian Democrats (CDU) won 40.7 per cent of the vote to the Social Democrats’ (SPD) 29.6 per cent in the small south-western state of Saarland, first official 
results showed.   

The far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) garnered 6.2 per cent of the vote, meaning that Saarland will become the 11th of Germany’s 16 states where it has cleared the 5-per-cent hurdle necessary for representation.   

Opinion polls ahead of the vote had put Germany’s two main parties neck-and-neck in the state with just under 1 million people.   

But in the end the CDU actually bested its performance in Saarland in 2012, when it was the top vote-getter at 35 per cent.   
Berlin (dpa), 27, March 2017