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CDU chief Armin Laschet (right) during an election campaign appearance next to Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff
Photo: Sebastian Willnow / dpa
In Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU has retained its status as a people's party: in the state elections last Sunday, the Christian Democrats were by far the strongest force.
And nationwide, too, the Union parties are in favor of the electorate around three and a half months before the general election.
This was the result of a representative survey by the opinion research institute Civey for SPIEGEL.
If the Bundestag election were on Sunday, the CDU and CSU would come to 29 percent, an improvement of two percentage points compared to the value achieved at the beginning of May.
The Greens, at that time still at 25 percent, lost recently.
They are currently at 21 percent.
(Read more about the Civey method
here
.)
Most recently, the values of the SPD, FDP and AfD remained essentially unchanged: The Social Democrats remain at 16 percent, the FDP is twelve and the AfD is ten percent.
The left comes to six percent, as it did recently.
Germany, black and green, Jamaica, traffic lights - or something else?
The current polls indicate - especially in view of the margin of error of 2.5 percentage points - that a number of coalitions appear to be at least arithmetically possible.
The so-called Germany coalition made up of the Union, SPD and FDP is currently receiving a particularly high level of support.
A good 20 percent of those questioned would most likely want this alliance after the federal election.
An alliance of the Greens, Social Democrats and Left finds support (15 percent), as does a black-green coalition (twelve percent) or a Jamaica alliance of the Union, Greens and FDP (eleven percent).
Ten percent are in favor of a traffic light coalition made up of the Greens, the SPD and the FDP.
A continuation of the grand coalition is less popular;
only around six percent consider this to be desirable.
The Kenya coalition of the Union, the Greens and the SPD, which has been tried and tested in Saxony-Anhalt, is hardly desired with approval ratings of around three percent.
Around a fifth of the population cannot warm to any of the above-mentioned constellations, preferring another coalition.
Germany coalition has many fans among supporters of the Union and FDP
It is interesting to see which alliances are particularly popular with voters from the various parties.
In the case of the Union, there is a German coalition (36 percent), a Jamaica alliance (21 percent) and black-green (15 percent).
For SPD supporters, an alliance with the Union and FDP with 15 percent is only the third favorite option - they favor a coalition with the Greens and the Left (28 percent) or a traffic light coalition (19 percent).
Supporters of the FDP see an alliance with the Union and the SPD (40 percent), above all Jamaica (24 percent) or another coalition (25 percent) as options.
The sympathies in the camp of those who support the Greens are fairly evenly distributed: They would prefer a green-red-red coalition (31 percent) even more than black-green (26 percent) and traffic lights (23 percent).
The latter is by far the desired alliance among voters on the left.
After all, 19 percent of AfD supporters are in favor of a German coalition, although the party would not be involved in such a coalition.
However, 72 percent would like a different government constellation.
Why the polls in Saxony-Anhalt were wrong
It is important that the values are not forecasts, but a snapshot of the mood in the country - and are subject to uncertainties due to the statistical error.
This was particularly evident in the election in Saxony-Anhalt.
Some of the surveys were far below the actual results.
In a Civey poll for SPIEGEL, for example, the CDU came to 29 percent four days before the election, the AfD to 28. In the end, there were around 16 percentage points between the two parties.
Experts see several reasons for the discrepancies.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, political scientist Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck mentioned the fact that survey institutes clean up and weight data in order to make the results more reliable (read the entire interview here.)
In addition, polls before state elections are more difficult to conduct.
It is more costly and laborious to create good samples.
In addition, East Germany is a special case when it comes to voting behavior.
"In the eastern federal states, party ties are weaker because the party system is not so deeply rooted there," said the political scientist.
Accordingly, there is also more fluctuation among voters there.
Civey comes to a similar conclusion.
The comparatively high deviation is "a phenomenon that we have repeatedly observed in the eastern German federal states - most recently in the state elections in Brandenburg, but also in the election in Saxony-Anhalt in 2016," said the opinion research institute.
It shows that voters here are »more mobile in their voting decisions«.
According to Civey, the different surveys on the Union and AfD could be due to tactical voting behavior on the part of the citizens.
The CDU and its Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff may have benefited from the concern that the AfD could become the strongest force.