As it happenedended

German elections 2017 - live updates: Far-right enters Bundestag for first time in half a century

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Jon Stone

Berlin

,Chloe Farand

Sunday 24 September 2017 21:18 BST

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The AfD party has entered parliament for the first time (Bongarts/Getty Images)

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Initial results in the German elections show the country’s far-right winning seats in the Bundestag for the first time in half a century.

The populist Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) comfortably took third place in the election, while the centre-left SPD crashed to a historically low result.

Angela Merkel is expected to be easily returned as Chancellor for the third election straight with a predicted 32.5 per cent over the vote, while small parties were up across the board.

The exact shape Ms Merkel's government will take after the election is uncertain, with an array of coalition options involving the SPD, the centre-right liberal FPD, or even the Greens, who sometimes cooperate with Ms Merkel’s CDU party at the state level.

Ahead of the election an average of major pollsters showed the far-right AfD on 13 per cent of the vote, ahead of left-wing Die Linke (11 per cent) the FDP, and the Greens (eight per cent). The results would leave the AfD, which currently has MPs in 13 out of the country’s 16 local state assemblies, with around 70 seats in the national parliament.

There had been speculation that the AfD could do even better than polls suggest, because of Germans keeping their support for the party secret. One survey commissioned by the tabloid newspaper Blid suggested that 40 per cent of Germans believe the party will do better than expected.