TT Elections in North Rhine Westphalia: SPD and the Greens are the apparent winners

For Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats this weekend's election in a key Western state was a double disaster. Northrhine Westphalia, with its 13.5 million voters, is ruled by the same centre-right coalition as in Berlin, so the poll amounts to the government's first electoral test since it was elected last September.Their losses cost the governing coalition its majority in the upper house of Parliament, depriving it of room to manoeuver at a moment when the eurozone, and Germany as its top economy, are facing a historic crisis. The apparent winners were the two parties who once governed together at national level, the SPD and the Greens.