Just over a month until the Germans can elect a new parliament. Angela Merkel is leaving politics after sixteen years, so there will be a new chancellor anyway.
The election campaign is unprecedentedly exciting: while a month ago it seemed that the race between the Christian Democrats of the CDU/CSU and the Greens would be over, the Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz have been catching up for a week or two.
Today, for the first time in 15 years, the SPD was even above the CDU/CSU in the polls. Here you will find the latest polls on a row.
Historically bad
The Christian Democrats are in a historically bad position. They are falling further and further towards the 20 percent mark in the polls. In the latest poll by Forsa, they got 22 percent of the vote, the lowest result ever. The party is deeply concerned, because – should this be the result of the elections – governments without the Christian Democrats are also possible.
“I don’t feel like being in opposition at all,” the leader of the Bavarian sister party Markus Söder recently grumbled. At the beginning of this year, he fought a fierce battle with party leader Armin Laschet for the leadership.
Laschet’s unpopularity is seen as one of the main reasons why the CDU is doing so badly. He has never been liked by voters, who find him colorless, planless and uncharismatic. An blunder visiting the flood plain has further tarnished his image.
Laschet is also Prime Minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which was severely affected by the floods this summer. During a TV speech by President Steinmeier, Laschet was joking with aid workers in the background. This came in for a lot of criticism.
Clumsy slips
Things are not going smoothly for the Greens either. Party leader Annalena Baerbock was caught ‘beautifying’ her CV and copied pieces of text without citing the source in her book ‘Jetzt’. She made some clumsy slips of the tongue and therefore seems to have to apologize all the time.
The mistakes Baerbock makes reinforce the image that its competitors want to paint of her: that Baerbock, as a 40-year-old with no management experience, is not ready for the Federal Chancellorship. The Greens are in third place in the polls.
The one profiting from this blunder is SPD leader Olaf Scholz. In surveys, he has long been seen as the most suitable chancellor of the three. Many see in him the politician with whom Germany remains perhaps most ‘the same’, the politician who resembles Merkel even more than her own party’s candidate, Laschet.
Scholz has not made any major slips so far, but has also remained outside the critical crosshairs of the media. Who knows, the criticism of his performance as finance minister in the Wirecard and CumEx scandals may still come. He also did not make a good impression as mayor of Hamburg during the G20, when left-wing radicals left a trail of destruction through the city.
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