A Fistful of Euros has the preliminary final results of the German election:

With 299 out of 300 districts reporting, the SPD gained 34.3% of the vote, CDU/CSU 35.2%, the Greens 8.1%, the F.D.P. 9.8%, and the Linkspartei.PDS 8.7%. This led to the following final preliminary projection by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen for the next Bundestag: 613 members (13 overhang seats, majority 307), 225 members for the CDU/CSU, 221 for the SPD, 61 for the F.D.P., 54 for the Linkspartei. PDS, 51 for the Greens

Some early views on the German election from the anglophone blogosphere:

Poltical Betting looks at where the polls went wrong in predicting an easy victory for the CDU. Mike Smithson says the result is a disaster for German pollsters “on the scale of the 1992 UK General Election when the pollsters had it neck and neck but John Major’s Tories came in 8% ahead in the popular vote.”.

Or it could just be that the polls were right and this was just a huge personal disaster for Angela Merkel, who saw a 10 per cent poll lead evaporate during her campaign.

A Fistful of Euros’ Tobias Schwartz joins the coalition speculation and says the “the vultures are already beginning to circle over Mrs Merkel”. Some pretenders to the CDU throne might welcome a grand coalition under Gerhard Schröder to run against in four years. Mrs T also thinks the biggest loser is Merkel who presided over a worse result than the Bavarian CSU premier Edmund Stoiber acheived for the conservative CDU/CSU bloc in 1992.

Third Avenue picks up on the Dresden by-election angle and notes that turnout was 79 per cent, “a rather humbling percentage compared to the feeble UK effort last spring”.

In the US, Instapundit provides the links needed to filter the German election through an American Republican prism.

MyDD also sees the outcome as a failure of the pollsters.

Oxblog has a roundup, too.

Update: Official turnout was 77.7 per cent, but that hardly negates Third Avenue&rsuo;s point.