Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party won a regional election in the German state of Hesse on Sunday as the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) suffered dramatic losses, exit polls showed, according to dpa. The polls showed the chancellor's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) narrowly increasing its share of the vote to around 38 per cent from the 36.8 it gained at the last, inconclusive, election in January 2008. The CDU's preferred coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), was tipped to win around 16 per cent, giving the two parties a comfortable majority in the 110-member legislature in Wiesbaden. The SPD, which governs with Merkel's party at national level, saw its share of the vote plunge to an historic low of 23-24 per cent compared to 36.7 per cent in the previous election. Hesse, one of Germany's most prosperous states where the financial centre of Frankfurt is located, has been administered for the past 10 months by a caretaker government led by CDU Prime Minister Roland Koch. Sunday's vote came less than a week after Merkel unveiled a 50-billion-euro (67 billion dollars) economic stimulus package designed to cushion the effects of a deepening recession. The vote kicked off a super election year, which sees five of the country's 16 states go to the polls, as well as elections for a new president in May, European elections in June and a general election on September 27. Voter support for the Hesse SPD had steadily eroded since a botched attempt to unseat Koch with help from the Greens and radical Left Party, which has its roots among former East German communists. The exit polls showed the Greens winning between 14 per cent and the Left Party, hovering around the 5 per cent hurdle they need to clear for parliamentary representation.
