European election poll of Germans shows big lead for conservatives
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A new opinion poll in Germany ahead of June's European Parliament elections show 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% of voters in the poll released on Friday by broadcaster RTL/ntv.
That is more than the combined support for all three parties in Scholz's struggling coalition. The CDU/CSU won 28.9% of the vote in the most recent European Parliament elections in 2019.
Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) polled at 16%, roughly steady from their 15.8% result in 2019. But coalition partners the Greens have seen support plunge, down to 14% from 20.5% in 2019, while the free-market liberal Free Democrats (FDP) dipped to just 3%, down from 5.4%.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been riding high in the polls for months, saw support slip to 15% among voters. That would still mark a hefty increase from 2019 EU election results, when the AfD won 11% 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 3 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 make it difficult for opinion research institutes to weight the data collected.
In principle, polls only reflect the opinion at the time of the survey and are not a forecast of election outcomes.
