BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel clinched a surprise absolute majority in her winning bid for a third term in German elections Sunday, estimates on public television indicated.

Voters turned out in droves to reward Merkel, often called the world's most powerful woman, with another four years at the helm for steering them unscathed through the debt turmoil that engulfed the eurozone's southern flank.

But in one of the tightest races in German history, they punished her pro-business partner, the Free Democrats, kicking them out of parliament for the first time since 1949, according to preliminary results on two public television networks.

Merkel's stunning 42.5 per cent score, the conservatives' highest result since national reunification in 1990, means that she may become the only chancellor to govern without a junior partner since Germany's first post-war leader, Konrad Adenauer.

“Together we will do everything in the next four years to again make them successful years for Germany,” Merkel told cheering members of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin.

“The party leadership will discuss everything when we have a final result but we can already celebrate tonight,” a beaming Merkel told supporters, including her chemist husband Joachim Sauer, a music fan who so rarely appears in public he is nicknamed “The Phantom of the Opera”.

An upstart anti-euro party, AfD, appeared to fall just short of the five-percent hurdle to representation with their bid to tap into anger over German contributions to bailout packages for stricken eurozone partners.

Exit polls had initially pointed to an awkward left-right “grand coalition”between Merkel's Christian Democrats and their traditional opponents, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), which scored around 26 per cent.

Merkel led a fractious grand coalition during her first term in 2005-2009, with the SPD's chancellor candidate this time around, Peer Steinbrueck, as her finance minister.

Political scientist Nils Diederich said Merkel had a tendency to bleed her coalition partners dry.

“You can compare Ms Merkel to a spider that feeds on the flies it captures,” he told AFP.

“That is what she did to the Social Democrats in 2009 and that is what she is doing now with the FDP.”

A physicist by training, Merkel is only the third person to win a third term in Germany after Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, the father of German unity.

If she serves at least until 2017, she will become Europe's longest serving female leader, besting Margaret Thatcher who was Britain's prime minister for 11 years.