German opposition leader Friedrich Merz’s conservatives were on course for a lackluster victory in the country’s national election on Sunday, while Alternative for Germany nearly doubled its support, the strongest showing for a far-right party since World War II, exit polls showed.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats were headed for a stinging defeat and a likely third-place finish with their worst postwar result in a national parliamentary election, the exit polls for ARD and ZDF public television indicated.

It was not immediately clear how easy it would be for Merz to put together a coalition government, with mainstream German parties’ so-called firewall around the far right precluding cooperation with Alternative for Germany, known by its German abbreviation AfD.

Merz, speaking after the exit polls, said “tonight we will celebrate, and from tomorrow we start working.”

“The world out there is not waiting for us” — an apparent reference to European leaders’ tensions with US President Donald Trump over the war in Ukraine.

Scholz, at the Social Democrats headquarters in Berlin, lamented his party’s “bitter election result” and congratulated Merz.

The party’s general secretary, Matthias Miersch, conceded that voters inflicted “a historic defeat” on his party and that Merz had a mandate to form the government. He suggested that the defeat was no surprise after three years of the unpopular government — “this election wasn’t lost in the last eight weeks.”

The election took place seven months earlier than originally planned after Scholz’s unpopular coalition collapsed in November, three years into a term that was increasingly marred by infighting. There was widespread discontent and not much enthusiasm for any of the candidates.

The exit polls put support for his Union bloc at 28.5-29% and Alternative for Germany, known by its German abbreviation AfD, at 19.5-20% — roughly double its result from 2021.

They put support for Scholz’s Social Democrats at 16-16.5%, far lower than in the last election. The environmentalist Greens, their remaining partners in the outgoing government, were on 13.5%.

Out of three smaller parties, one — the hard-left Left Party — appeared certain to win seats in parliament with 8.5-9% of the vote. Two other parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, were around the threshold of the 5% support needed to win seats.

Whether Merz will need one or two partners to form a coalition will depend on how many parties get into parliament.

“One thing is clear: the Union has won the election,” Carsten Linnemann, the general secretary of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union party. “The new chancellor will be called Friedrich Merz.”

Meanwhile, AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, hailed her party’s “historic” result.

Though Merz has ruled out working with AfD, Weidel said her party is “open for coalition negotiations” with the conservatives, and that “otherwise no change of policy is possible in Germany.”

In a strange twist to the polarized campaign, the AfD has basked in the support lavished on it by Trump allies, with billionaire Elon Musk touting it as the only party to “save Germany.”

The AfD, strongest in the ex-communist east, also made gains in western states for its best-ever result, after Germany was shocked by a series of high-profile attacks.

In December, a car rammed through a Christmas market crowd, killing six people and wounding hundreds, with a Saudi man arrested at the scene.

More deadly attacks followed, both blamed on Afghan asylum seekers: a stabbing spree targeting kindergarten children and another car-ramming attack in Munich.

And on Friday, a Syrian man who police said wanted to “kill Jews” was arrested after a Spanish tourist was stabbed in the neck at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.

German exit polls are supplemented with pre-election polling to represent people voting by absentee ballot.

The election was dominated by worries about the years-long stagnation of Europe’s biggest economy, and pressure to curb migration. It took place against a background of growing uncertainty over the future of Ukraine and Europe’s alliance with the United States.

Germany is the most populous country in the 27-nation European Union and a leading member of NATO. It has been Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier, after the US. It will be central to shaping the continent’s response to the challenges of the coming years, including the Trump administration’s confrontational foreign and trade policy.

More than 59 million people in the nation of 84 million were eligible to elect the 630 members of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, who will take their seats under the glass dome of Berlin’s landmark Reichstag building.