Voters handed German Chancellor Angela Merkel a wake-up call Sunday on nuclear power after the Japan crisis as the Greens more than doubled their score in the second of 2011's seven state elections.
The result will give the ecologist party high hopes for a much bigger prize: success in an election next Sunday in the wealthy south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the most important of the year's electoral tests.
Projections in Saxony-Anhalt indicated Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) came first and were likely to stay in power in coalition with their sworn enemies at national level, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). This was despite the CDU's share of the vote slipping some three percentage points. The SPD's share of the vote was little changed on 21.4 percent, behind the far-left Die Linke, on 23.5 percent, also little changed.
But the big winners of the vote in the impoverished eastern state - unemployment stands at 13 percent - were the Greens, who more than doubled their score to seven percent. The far-right NPD won 4.5 percent, below the five percent needed to enter the state parliament. The pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), Merkel's coalition partners at federal level, will also be unrepresented, scoring 3.5 percent.
The surge in the Greens' support was seen as being in large part down to Merkel's stance on nuclear power after Japan's earthquake and tsunami on March 11 pushed reactors at the Fukushima plant to the brink of a meltdown.
People "want to know, particularly after the tragedy in Japan, what a responsible energy policy will look like", Greens co-head Claudia Roth said.
The result, although driven to a large extent by local issues, "showed one thing: that the rise of the anti-nuclear movement is only boosting the Greens", the Stuttgarter Zeitung daily said in a Monday editorial.