Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) declared victory Sunday as exit polls and early results suggest the party garnered the biggest vote share in the country’s elections—and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is projected to nab a historic number of votes after billionaire Elon Musk’s endorsement.

Germany’s elections are seen as particularly important in Europe, as the country has the largest population in the European Union and the highest GDP.

Results are now rolling in, and it will likely become clear in the coming hours how the final results match up with the exit polls. Determining who will lead as chancellor will take longer, as it first has to be determined which parties will control the Bundestag, and then the leader is chosen by its members.

When Germans vote Sunday, it will only determine who’s elected to parliament and how the Bundestag will be divided between the parties based on the popular vote. Germany has a variety of political parties and it’s unlikely that any single party will win an outright majority, so different parties have to band together and form a coalition that has majority support to make decisions in the legislature. Once a coalition is formed, the German president—different from the chancellor—will propose a chancellor to lead the government, which is then voted on by parliament. The entire process can take weeks or months, Euronews notes.

Merz, the anticipated next chancellor of Germany, is a conservative figure who returned to politics after previously leaving to pursue a corporate career in the 2000s. He’s a longtime rival of Merkel who had left politics after she ascended to power in Germany, and previously lost two votes to lead the CDU in 2018 and 2021. He holds more conservative views than Merkel and represents a further-right faction of the party, particularly on immigration. Merz garnered widespread backlash in January when he got an anti-immigration resolution passed in the Bundestag with help from some AfD politicians, which was viewed as breaking the longtime “firewall” of major parties not working with the far-right party. He has since reiterated his vows not to work with AfD.

AfD is Germany’s furthest right major party, though the leadership itself has insisted it’s not far-right but rather a “libertarian, conservative” party. It has also denounced associations with Nazism. The party was formed in 2013 as an anti-European Union party but has broadened to embrace a variety of right-wing positions, most notably a hardline stance on immigration after Germany accepted a particularly high number of migrants from countries like Syria. The party is putting forth its first candidate for chancellor in this election, Weidel, a former Goldman Sachs analyst who Al Jazeera notes has been with the party since its formation in 2013. The party has gained popularity more recently among younger voters as it has made inroads via TikTok, BBC News notes, with younger men particularly backing the party. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany has also been fueled by a string of violent attacks that were allegedly committed by immigrants, with the BBC reporting five such attacks have taken place since May, most recently a stabbing Friday at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.

While AfD is poised to get the second-highest share of votes in Germany’s elections, other leaders in the German government, including Merz, have vowed not to work with the party. That means that even though AfD is poised to get a significant number of seats in the Bundestag, CDU is expected not to form a coalition with it, and instead work only with other political parties. AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla on Sunday called on other parties to work with AfD, however, saying the party has been “given a mandate to bring about political change.” “We have received the confidence of the voters and that should be something everybody else accepts as well,” Chrupalla said, as quoted by the BBC.

Musk has repeatedly boosted AfD, including by appearing by video at a rally, hosting a conversation with Weidel and authoring an op-ed in a German newspaper praising the party. He has continued praising AfD on X ahead of Sunday’s election, pinning a post to the top of his profile that says “AfD!” with a string of German flags and responding “Yes” on Sunday to a post saying German voters should vote for the party because their “life depends on it.” Vance also drew controversy from other German leaders when he met with Weidel in February and chastised European leaders in a speech for not working with far-right parties like AfD.

The head of Germany’s leading Jewish organization expressed concern Sunday about the AfD’s strong showing. “It must concern us all that a fifth of German voters are giving their vote to a party that is at least partly right-wing extremist, that openly seeks linguistic and ideological links to right-wing radicalism and neo-Nazism, that plays on people’s fears and only offers them ostensible solutions,” Josef Schuster, who leads the Central Council of Jews, told newspaper Die Welt, as quoted by the AP.

Germany is holding its election sooner than scheduled, after Scholz’s three-party coalition government in the Bundestag fell apart late last year when the chancellor fired then-Finance Minister Christian Lindner amid growing infighting. Scholz then faced a vote of no-confidence from the Bundestag in December, which The Guardian reports he deliberately called and lost in order to force a new election. The anticipated rise in support for AfD comes as far-right populist parties throughout Europe made inroads and gained power in recent years, including in Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy and Portugal.