FILE PHOTO: A car passes near an election poster showing Olaf Scholz, German Minister of Finance and top candidate of the The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who holds a letter for postal voting in Hanover, Germany August 17, 2021. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
August 24, 2021
BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have pulled ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives for the first time in 15 years, according to an opinion poll published on Tuesday, just a month before the country’s federal election.
Merkel, in power since 2015, will step down after the Sept. 26 election, with her conservative bloc already weakened by divisions over the direction of the party.
Support for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has been falling steadily in recent weeks.
The SPD was up 2 percentage points compared to a week ago on 23%, while the CDU/CSU slipped a point to 22% and the Greens are down a point at 18%, according to the Forsa poll for RTL/NTV conducted on Aug. 17-23 among 1,532 people.
Forsa said this was the first time that the SPD had been ahead of the CDU/CSU since October 2006, with the latest rating for Merkel’s party at its lowest level since the polling institute was set up in 1984.
Some conservatives have blamed the drop in support on the bloc’s candidate for chancellor, CDU chairman Armin Laschet, whose ratings have tumbled since he was caught on camera laughing during a visit last month to a town hit by floods.
Support for Laschet fell again in the Forsa poll, while it rose for the SPD’s candidate, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz.
(Reporting by Emma ThomassonEditing by Riham Alkousaa)
Source: One America News Network
