According to early results, Germany’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) narrowly defeated Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party (CDU) in the German federal elections.

After the 16-year Merkel term, the Germans will wait a while to learn about their new leader. According to the projections, Olaf Scholz, the social democratic party SPD, who served as finance minister in the last government after the federal elections held on Sunday, seems to have narrowly won the election with 25.7 percent.

In recent weeks, the Christian democrats CDU-CSU, led by Armin Laschet, for whom Chancellor Angela Merkel took the field for herself, fell to second place with 24.1 percent. The CDU-CSU bloc won less than 30 percent of the vote for the first time since World War II. While the Greens achieved a record high rate of votes in the same period with 15.8 percent, the liberal FDP, which is sure to be a coalition partner in a possible government, received 11.5 percent of the votes.

After the results, two coalition scenarios came to the fore: the SPD, the Greens, and FDP coalition, which is called the ‘traffic lamp’ because of the party colors, and the CDU/CSU, the Greens and the FDP coalition, which is called ‘Jamaica.’

While the coalition talks are expected to take months, this period will be spent under Merkel’s premiership.

Scholz: Federal Elections Showed that Germany Chose Change

Olaf Scholz, the prime ministerial candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany, stated that he was satisfied with the election results and that the German people wanted to see him as prime minister.

Scholz, in his speech addressing the party members after the first election results were announced, “Our people want to see Olaf Scholz as prime minister.” said.

SPD’s candidate for chancellor Scholz described the election results as a “great success”, noting that the voters clearly wanted a “change of government” with the election result.

Scholz, who thanked the 400 thousand SPD members for their high support in the last few weeks, emphasized that they would wait for the final result in the election.