Berlin — Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday she would talk with mainstream parties about trying to form a "good, stable" government after Germany’s watershed election, and vowed to win back voters who supported an upstart nationalist force. In Sunday’s election, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party poached 1-million votes from Merkel’s conservatives, leaving her without an obvious coalition to lead Europe’s largest economy. "We had hoped for a better result," she admitted, referring to her CDU/CSU bloc’s 33% score, its worst outcome since 1949. Merkel, 63, said she would now seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Greens. And she would extend an olive branch to the Social Democrats, her junior partners for eight of her 12 years in power, who regressed to a crushing 20.5% share of the vote and pledged to go into opposition. The poll marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam AfD that, with 12.6%, became ...
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