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Lars Klingbeil, the SPD leader who is expected to become vice-chancellor and finance minister, said that while no hasty decision would be made, the government would consider banning the AfD.

The deputy leader of the Social Democrat SPD, Serpil Midyatli, said it was now in black and white what everybody already knew.

And it could happen that the center-left party forms a coalition with the center-right party and your vote goes in a completely different direction than you wanted, as will likely happen for a lot of SPD voters in Germany now.

The AfD will be represented in the Bundestag, but it won’t be represented in the government, which will likely be a coalition of the CDU, which had the strongest showing, together with SPD.

On a national level, the worst-case scenario would be for a breakdown in a Merz-led coalition: "Merz could make mistakes. If he gets really tough on immigration, it might become problematic with the SPD."