BERLIN - Chancellor Angela Merkel's allies rallied behind the German leader on Monday and stressed that they would stick to their turnaround on nuclear power as the opposition Greens celebrated a stunning election victory in a state Merkel's party governed for 58 years.

The Greens - one of whose main selling points was their anti-nuclear stance - were poised to lead a center-left alliance in the prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, complete with their first-ever state governor, after narrowly defeating the governing center-right coalition.

The vote had been overshadowed by events in Japan, which prompted Merkel to abruptly freeze recently drawn-up plans to extend German nuclear plants' lives, and she ordered the oldest plants shut down temporarily. That apparently disoriented some of her own supporters and raised questions over her credibility.

"I still think the moratorium was right, but we didn't succeed in this short time in making clear that we meant it seriously and where we want to go," said Volker Bouffier, governor of Hesse state and a member of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats.

Bouffier acknowledged that it was "extremely painful" to lose Baden-Wuerttemberg, which the party had led since 1953. But he stressed that there was no appetite to punish the chancellor. "Angela Merkel leads this party and she will in future too," Bouffier said.

The party "stands united behind Angela Merkel", its general-secretary, Hermann Groehe, said on ARD television. He stressed that the government will stick to its new course on nuclear power, and said he expects most of the seven old reactors to remain offline.

Merkel currently has no serious rivals in her party, which still emerged as the biggest in Sunday's election and made small gains in a separate vote in neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate state.

"Ms Merkel is certainly tarnished in the short term now," said Oskar Niedermayer, a political science professor at Berlin's Free University. But he said that with federal elections more than two years away, it is far too early to speculate about any long-term damage.

Things look bleaker for her junior coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrats of Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Their share of the vote was halved in both Sunday's elections - ejecting them from government in Baden-Wuerttemberg and from the state legislature entirely in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Associated Press