Vote winner Merkel faces tricky coalition talks, hard-right 'earthquake'

Berlin : German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after celebrating her fourth election win, wakes up Monday to the double headache of an emboldened hard-right opposition party and thorny coalition talks ahead.

If the campaign was widely decried as boring, its result was a bombshell -- a populist surge weakened both Merkel's conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats, handing both their worst results in decades.

After 12 years in power and running on a promise of stability and continuity, Merkel's CDU/CSU bloc scored 32.9 percent, against 20.8 percent for the Social Democrats under challenger Martin Schulz.

The election spelt a breakthrough for the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD), which with 13 percent became the third strongest party and vowed to "go after" Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.

The entry of dozens of hard-right nationalist MPs to the glass-domed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War II Germany and was labelled as a "political earthquake" by top-selling Bild daily.

"We will take our country back," vowed the AfD's jubilant Alexander Gauland, who has recently urged Germans to be proud of their war veterans and said a politician with Turkish roots should be "disposed of in Anatolia". 

While joyful supporters of the AfD -- a party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain's UKIP -- sang the German anthem late Sunday, hundreds of protesters outside shouted "Nazis out!"