Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a challenge for power by the communist successor party 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall as two eastern German states hold elections today. While Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union became the east’s dominant force after Helmut Kohl reunified Germany in 1990, polls suggest the anti-capitalist Left party is poised to take power in a state for the first time in Thuringia, ousting the CDU. Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, is also voting. Projections based on exit polls are due at 6 p.m. Berlin time. Merkel, Germany’s first chancellor from the ex-communist east, used seven ... (full story)