BERLIN, March 9 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday's election in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg was a "bitter" result for his conservatives but would not affect the government in Berlin as he again ruled out cooperating with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The preliminary official result of the vote saw the environmental Greens marginally ahead of Merz's Christian Democrats (CDU), leaving the two parties poised to continue the coalition that has run Baden-Wuerttemberg for the past decade.
The Chancellor repeated his rejection of cooperating with the AfD, which finished in third place, confirming its position as Germany's largest opposition party, even outside its heartland in the eastern states.
Merz said the result was largely due to the popularity of the Greens' lead candidate, Cem Ozdemir, a moderate former agriculture minister with a more established profile than his 37-year-old CDU rival Manuel Hagel.
He said he had spoken with the leaders of his Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners in Berlin and promised to move ahead more quickly with reforms to the sluggish economy, which is emerging from two years in recession.
"We agree that this result will have no impact on the coalition here in Berlin. We will continue our work," he told a news conference at the CDU party headquarters in Berlin.
"We need to make up for the ground we have lost in Germany over many years and decades, and we in the coalition are aware of this, as is the SPD," he said, pledging to make "more substantial progress" with promised economic reforms.
Initially trailing in the race, the Greens caught up with Merz's Christian Democrats as the ballot approached, helped by the popularity of Ozdemir. But the final result of the election, run on a mixture of direct and proportional representation, left the two parties with the same number of seats in state parliament.
(Reporting by James Mackenzie, Editing by Linda Pasquini and Ros Russell)
