German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) have delivered a crushing blow to her centre-left rivals in a bellwether state election.
Merkel's CDU secured 33 per cent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, according to preliminary results, seizing the most populous state in the country from the opposition SPD.
The vote delivers fresh momentum as she gears up to make her bid for a fourth term as leader of Europe's biggest economy in September's national election.
Her party had already scored victories in two other recent state elections - the small industrial state of Saarland and the northern coastal region of Schleswig Holstein.
The North Rhine-Westphalia result brought to an end the SPD government led by state Premier Hannelore Kraft, who stepped down both as state leader and as state party chief.
The SPD vote slumped from 39.1 per cent in the last election in 2012 to just 31.2 per cent on Sunday.
About 13 million of North Rhine-Westphalia's 18 million residents were eligible to vote, representing more than one-fifth of the total national electorate.
The CDU is hoping to mount a national campaign in September built around Merkel, who has been in office since 2005, as a force of political stability and a steady hand on the global stage.
"We are going very, very confidently with a tailwind into the Bundestag election," said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a national parliamentary leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats.
The SPD's defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia strikes a major blow to the party and its candidate for chancellor, the former European Parliament president Martin Schulz.
A crestfallen Schulz described on German public TV the outcome as "a crushing defeat." Ahead of the vote Schulz had linked victory in the state to winning power in Berlin later this year.
He insisted, however, that the national election was still some time off. "I'm an experienced election fighter," he declared.
Sunday's poll also represented a key test of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose support has been hit by an acrimonious internal power struggle and Merkel's efforts to defuse the refugee crisis.
The AfD secured 7.4 per cent of the vote on Sunday, meaning the party is now represented in 13 of Germany's parliaments. But the result was well short of its own ambitions to emerge as the third political force in North Rhine Westphalia.
Sunday's poll was a disaster for Kraft's coalition partner, the environmental Greens, who garnered just 6.4 per cent of the vote, down from 11.3 per cent in the last election in 2012.
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