Germany: SPD celebrates election victory in Lower Saxony

Stephan Weil, Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) leading candidate for Lower Saxony's state election, celebrated in in Hannover on Sunday after the party’s victory.
Addressing the large cheering crowd, Weil said everyone who took part deserved to celebrate the result.
The SPD won 37.3 percent of the vote, while the CDU lost by four points, at 33.4 percent. The Greens won around 8.9 percent, followed by the Free Democrats (FDP) at 7.4 percent, and Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 6.2 percent. The far-left Die Linke, did not reach the 5 percent roof to enter parliament as it scored only 4.6 percent of the votes.
Speaking from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)'s headquarters in Hannover, the defeated candidate Bernd Althusmann told his supporters that his party will keep fighting to win in Lower Saxony in the coming years.
The state election in Lower Saxony comes shortly after the national elections on September 24.
Currently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) party is taking steps to build a coalition with other parties on a national level. However, the SPD has stated that they will go into opposition in the Bundestag, the German national parliament.