LONDON — Chancellor Angela Merkel won a decisive second term Sunday in elections that are likely to shunt Germany's government to the right.
Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union took 33.8% of the vote in a contest that was almost unanimously criticized by commentators as dull and uninspiring.
As an added plus for Merkel, the small libertarian Free Democrats came in third with 14.6%, official results showed. That will allow her to rule in coalition with the pro-business party and pursue an agenda of lower taxes and labor reform.
Together, the two parties won 332 seats in the lower house of Parliament, compared with other parties' combined 290.
The vote ends the awkward government of the last four years, which yoked the Christian Democrats, or CDU, with their archrivals, the left-of-center Social Democrats, in a "grand coalition."
For the Social Democrats, Sunday was a humiliating defeat that saw the party plunge to its worst performance since World War II: 23%. The rout will almost certainly propel them out of coalition government for the first time in 11 years.
It was a "bitter day," the Social Democrats' leader, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, acknowledged to supporters after the polls closed and the results began streaming in. But he promised that the party would remain a political force pressing for fairer distribution of wealth and protection of workers.
"I promise you that we will be an opposition that will look very closely at what happens, how this new team will react," said Steinmeier, who has been Germany's foreign minister in the coalition government. "It has to prove that it knows what it's doing."
As a candidate, Steinmeier was seen as a bland bureaucrat unable to fire the public imagination. By contrast, although Merkel was lambasted by political watchers for running a soporific campaign almost devoid of substantive debate, she held on to her high personal-approval ratings to win reelection as Germany's first female leader.
"We have achieved something great," she told cheering party members in a victory speech Sunday evening. "We have managed to achieve our election aim of a stable majority in Germany for a new government."
She said she would initiate talks with the Free Democrats about forming a center-right coalition. Such a pairing would enable Merkel, 55, to tackle the contentious issue of labor-market reform in Germany, where companies complain about stringent worker protections that they say drag down business and competitiveness.
