Confirmed: Merkel's Party Wins, Falls Short of Absolute Majority

Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party has expectedly won Germany's election, but finished just short of an absolute majority, official results show.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) bloc took about 42% of the vote. However, her preferred liberal partners failed to overcome the election threshold. The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won only 4.8%, leaving it with no national representation in parliament for the first time in Germany's post-war history.

The FDP was beaten by the Green Party (8.4%) and the former communist Left Party (8.6%), and even the new Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), which advocates withdrawal from the euro currency and took about 4.7%, just short of the parliamentary threshold, the BBC informs.

Merkel’s party may have to seek a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) who won about 26% of the vote.

The last such grand coalition was led by Merkel from 2005 to 2009, but it took 65 days to negotiate before reaching agreement.