The chancellor is not directly elected.
Nevertheless, pollsters ask who would have the best chance in a direct election.
And here there was an overtaking maneuver last.
Berlin - SPD Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz has overtaken Union candidate Armin Laschet (CDU) in favor of voters after several recent polls.
If the Chancellor in Germany could be directly elected, 20 percent of the participants in the online survey by the opinion research institute YouGov would choose the current Minister of Finance, Scholz.
15 percent would elect NRW Prime Minister Laschet, 13 percent would vote for the Green Party and Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock.
A similar picture emerges in a survey of citizens over the age of 18 by the ZDF “Politbarometer”: Here, 34 percent (plus six points within two weeks) say that Scholz would “prefer” them as Federal Chancellor, followed of 29 percent for Laschet (minus eight) and 20 percent for Baerbock (plus two).
Swapped positions
The positions of Laschet and Scholz have thus been reversed.
A month earlier, the Union candidate had been in the YouGov survey at 21 percent, his competitor from the SPD at 16 percent.
One possible explanation is the actions of Laschet after the devastating floods in mid-July in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he drew criticism for a failed performance.
The Chancellor is not directly elected in Germany.
Instead, parties will be on the ballot for the federal election on September 26th, some of which will negotiate the formation of a coalition after the election.
The governing parties usually hold a majority of the seats in the Bundestag.
As a rule, the strongest party also provides the head of government.
CDU / CSU in front in election polls
In the answer to the question "If there were to be a general election next Sunday, which party would you vote?", The CDU / CSU achieved 28 percent (minus two points compared to the previous month), the SPD (plus 1) and the Greens (minus 3) at YouGov were tied at 16 percent.
AfD and FDP were each able to improve by one point to 12 percent.
The left would have eight percent (plus 1).
In the ZDF “Politbarometer” the Union loses two points on the Sunday question within two weeks and also comes to 28 percent, the Greens come to 21 percent (plus one percentage point).
The SPD increases slightly to 16 percent (plus one percentage point), as does the AfD with eleven percent (plus one point).
The FDP remains unchanged at ten percent, the left at seven percent.
The free voters would come to three percent.
Election polls are generally always fraught with uncertainty. Among other things, declining party ties and increasingly short-term voting decisions make it more difficult for opinion research institutes to weight the data collected. For example, YouGov cites a statistical error tolerance of 2.1 percentage points (with a proportion of 30 percent) and 1.0 points (with a proportion of 5 percent). In principle, surveys only reflect the opinion at the time of the survey and are not predictions of the outcome of the election. dpa