A new opinion poll in Germany ahead of June’s European Parliament elections shows the centre-right opposition bloc well ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) saw support climb to 34 per cent of voters in the poll released on Friday.
That is more than the combined support for all three parties in Scholz’s struggling coalition.
The CDU/CSU won 28.9 per cent of the vote in the most recent European Parliament elections in 2019.
Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), polled at 16 per cent, roughly steady from their 15.8 per cent result in 2019.
But coalition partners, the Greens, had seen support plunge down to 14 per cent from 20.5 per cent in 2019, while the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP) dipped to just three per cent, down from 5.4 per cent.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which had been riding high in the polls for months, saw support slip to 15 per cent among voters.
That would still mark a hefty increase from 2019 EU election results, when the AfD won 11 per cent of the vote.
The poll was conducted on behalf of RTL/ntv by the Forsa Institute opinion research group and carries a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Forsa surveyed 1,008 eligible German voters on March 12-13.
Election polls are generally fraught with uncertainty.
Among other things, declining party loyalty and increasingly short-term voting decisions made it difficult for opinion research institutes to weigh the data collected.
In principle, polls only reflected the opinion at the time of the survey and are not a forecast of election outcomes. (dpa/NAN)
