German leftists gain eough support to defeat Angela Merkel in next poll: Survey

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Photo by AFP)

A new opinion survey in Germany suggests the country’s left-wing political parties can now gather enough votes to oust the ruling government of Chancellor Angela Merkel in September’s polls.

The survey, conducted by the INSA institute and due to be published in the Bild newspaper on Tuesday, found that for the first instance “in a long time” a left-of-center coalition would gain sufficient support to force Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of office.

According to a report by the German daily prior to the release of the survey results, the country’s three left-leaning parties are now shown to have enough votes since the last election in 2013 to defeat rightist CDU and its sister Bavarian sister party in the next election.

In the 2013 electoral race, the leftist parties failed to form a coalition to defeat Merkel’s CDU party due to lingering opposition by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to alliances with the hard-left Linke Party. 

Support for all three leftist parties then dropped drastically following the 2013 poll and never recovered until this new survey.

The poll found that the SPD would win 31 percent of the vote, along with 10 percent support for the far-left Linke Party as well as seven percent of votes for the pro-environment Greens Party, adding up to a total of 48 percent and giving the edge to a leftist coalition in the September poll.

The right-wing parties, led by CDU’s 30-percent support, would then be left with 47 percent of the vote, the survey of 2,028 voters found. The remaining five percent would represent much smaller parties.

Merkel, however, remains optimistic for a revival of support for her party before the fall election later in the year.