The countdown is running.
The SPD, Greens and FDP want to elect a new Chancellor as early as St. Nicholas Week: Olaf Scholz is to lead a traffic light government.
So a position in this coalition is planned - but what about the other posts in the cabinet?
Even if it is always said that personnel issues will be decided at the end, discussions within the parties are already underway.
Some candidates like Christian Lindner (FDP) or Robert Habeck (Greens) are considered seed.
But does the population also consider them competent to be in the cabinet?
A representative survey by the opinion research institute Civey for SPIEGEL now shows who the Germans can most likely imagine as future ministers.
Compared to Habeck and the traffic expert Cem Özdemir, the Chancellor candidate of the Greens, Annalena Baerbock, scores significantly worse in the survey.
Only just under one in three trusts her to hold a ministerial office.
In the SPIEGEL survey, there were a total of 23 politicians who are currently considered possible members of the Scholz cabinet.
The prerequisite for participating in the survey was to know the respective people.
You can find out more about the Civey method here.
During the election campaign, the SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz had promised to fill his cabinet equally.
However, there is no woman among the five people who are most likely to be considered ministerial.
With Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann from the FDP, the first female politician is in ninth place - and is the only female politician to achieve 50 percent approval.
Directly after Strack-Zimmermann comes the parliamentary managing director of the FDP, Marco Buschmann, in tenth place, before Katrin Göring-Eckardt from the Greens is the second woman in eleventh place with a result of 36 percent.
It is noteworthy that among the five politicians with the highest approval ratings, the party that received the most votes in the federal election in September is not represented: the SPD.
Of all the SPD politicians surveyed, the German labor ministers consider Hubertus Heil most suitable to continue to lead a ministry in the future.
This means that he is also the minister from the current government with the highest approval.
His party colleagues, health expert Karl Lauterbach and Secretary General Lars Klingbeil, are right behind.
The current SPD ministers Christine Lambrecht (Justice and Family) and Svenja Schulze (Environment) are considered to be significantly less ministerial.
The SPD federal chairwoman, Saskia Esken, received the lowest approval of all potential candidates for a ministerial office.
According to this, not even every sixth person trusts her to hold a ministerial office.
Among the other politicians with the weakest approval ratings, besides Anton Hofreiter from the Greens, are mainly those who have not previously appeared in the front row of their respective party.
lau / svs