Candidate's Death to Delay Election Results

The death of a neo-Nazi candidate could delay the final result of Germany's Sept.18 elections and the appointment of the country's new chancellor by at least one week, an electoral official said Thursday. Irene Schneider-Böttcher, the head of the electoral commission in the eastern state of Saxony, said it had been forced to delay voting in one district of Dresden after the candidate of the far-right National Democratic Party, Kerstin Lorenz, died. A new election date for the city's district 160 with its roughly 219,000 voters has not been set yet, she said, adding that if the election proved close in the rest of the country, what happened in Dresden could influence the result and the conclusion of negotiations between the parties who won seats in parliament about the formation of a new government. Schneider-Böttcher noted that the outcome of the last elections in 2002 saw a photo finish between the Social Democrats and the opposition Christian Democrats in Dresden and the rest of Saxony. In Dresden, the Social Democrats won by less than a percentage point on the second vote, while in the state the opposition prevailed.