A record-high 64.8% of eligible voters in Germany turned out for the European Parliament elections, the highest since reunification, a top official said early Monday.
The figure was 3.4 percentage points higher than in 2019, which at the time had been the highest turnout since German reunification in 1990.
After tallying all 400 constituencies, the proportion of invalid votes was 0.8%, according to Federal Returning Officer Ruth Brand.
The most populous EU country accounts for 96 of the 720 seats in the European Parliament, with around 65 million eligible voters.
In Germany's first post-reunification European Parliament election in 1994, the turnout was exactly 60%. In subsequent elections it hovered between 40% and 50%.
The highest turnout in an EU election in Germany was at the premiere in 1979 with 65.7% in what was then West Germany.
According to the preliminary official results, the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance won the European Parliament elections in Germany by a large margin - ahead of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was the second-strongest party.
The Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), who are in opposition domestically together, got 30% of votes, translating to 29 seats.
The AfD improved significantly from 11% in 2019 to 15.9% for 15 seats.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition meanwhile took a big hit. His Social Democrats (SPD) posted 13.9% (14 seats) in what was the worst showing in a democratic nationwide election in more than a century for the centre-left party, which has historically been one of the dominant parties in German politics.
Scholz's primary coalition partners domestically, the Greens, plummeted even further to 11.9% (12 seats) significantly down on their 2019 result of 20.5%, while junior coalition partner FDP received 5.2% (5 seats).
The newly founded populist party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) hit 6.2% (6 seats), while the far-left The Left party tumbled to just 2.7% (3 seats).
The right-wing populist Free Voters won three seats, as did transnational centrist political movement Volt. The parody party Die Partei took two seats while the Ecological Democratic Party ÖDP, animal protection party Tierschutzpartei and the Family Party won a seat each.
