The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has run Saxony -- in eastern Germany -- since the German reunification in 1990, maintained its majority in the state, with 56.9 per cent of the vote. The CDU is slightly down from its 1994 figures, according to provisional results released by the election commission early today.

Second were the former Communists in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) with 22.2 per cent of the vote. The 4,80,118 votes they got were more than double Schroeder's Social Democratic Party's (SPD) polled. In the 1994 vote, the SPD narrowly beat the former Communists for second place.The SPD's junior partner in Schroeder's coalition government, the Greens, did not even get the five per cent of votes required to take any seats in state parliament. They finished with just 2.6 percent of the votes cast, behind the far Right party.

The Liberal FDP and the extreme Right also garnered less than three per cent of the vote. The results give the CDU 76 votes in the new state parliament, a drop of one seat.