German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party has won elections but finished just short of an absolute majority, official results show.

Mrs Merkel earlier urged her party to celebrate "a super result" after exit polls suggested she was set to win a historic third term.

Her Christian Democrats (CDU) took about 42% of the vote.

But she might yet have to seek a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) who won about 26% of the vote.

Mrs Merkel's preferred liberal partners appear not to have made it into parliament.

Exit polls for ARD public television put the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) on 4.7%, which if confirmed would be a disaster for the junior coalition partner, leaving it with no national representation in parliament.

Party chairman Philipp Roesler called it "the bitterest, saddest hour of the Free Democratic Party".

The FDP was beaten by the Green Party (8%) and the former communist Left Party (8.5%), and even, according to exit polls, the new Alternative fuer Deutschland, which advocates withdrawal from the euro currency and took 4.9%, just short of the parliamentary threshold.

There was at one point speculation on German television that Mrs Merkel's CDU and their Bavarian sister CSU might even win enough seats for an absolute majority - the first in half a century.

The ARD channel's projection had her group winning 297 seats against 301 for the other three parties, while ZDF had her even with the other three.

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