Sunday question
AfD pulls the same for the first time with Union
The Union with the CDU chairman and alleged future Chancellor Friedrich Merz slips in the surveys after the Bundestag election. The needy is the competition from the right outside.
Six weeks after the Bundestag election, the AfD caught up with the Union in voting. For the first time, the right is in a nationwide survey of 24 percent at the same amount with the CDU and CSU. This is their highest value so far.
What explanation is there?
Obviously, the AfD benefits primarily from a disappointment with the Union, for example because of the enormous debt program for investments, which it made possible together with SPD and the Greens through a change in the Basic Law.
Before the election, Union Chancellor candidate and CDU boss Friedrich Merz had significantly rejected additional government debt and profound changes to the debt brake. A large majority of voters in Germany sees the change of course a voter deception, as the ZDF polite barometer had shown.
According to the Institute Insa, the CDU and CSU have lost 4.5 percentage points for the “Bild” since the Bundestag election, and the AfD has been able to get 3.2 points since then. The Social Democrats also continue to lose encouragement and are now 16 percent (16.4 percent in the federal election).
How does the AfD evaluate the numbers?
It feels confirmed. Party leader Alice Weidel had said shortly after the federal election: “We will overtake the CDU in the next few years and that will be very, very quickly.”
“It is time for a real bourgeois politics,” she wrote in the morning on the X platform. There is no way around the AfD.
When asked about the survey, CSU state group leader Alexander Dobrindt said before the beginning of a new round of the black and red coalition negotiations: “You shouldn’t read as much news and messages in coalition negotiations. You have to concentrate on what is now the task.”
Union negotiators Jens Spahn (CDU) said that the surveys and the election result showed that trust had to be recovered massively. “It has to be better for the country. That is what concerns us all and where we try to find good compromises.”
Would an AfD be automatically an AfD Chancellor in a federal election in a federal election?
No. Chancellors are elected in the Bundestag – this requires a majority. To achieve them, various parties must come together (coalition). However, all other parties rule out cooperation with the AfD, so an AfD Chancellor is currently not foreseeable, even if the AfD became the strongest force.
But what if the AfD gets the absolute majority in a federal election and would no longer be dependent on other parties?
An unlikely scenario. Could you basically imagine choosing the AfD? This was answered, for example, in the ARD Germany trend of the opinion research institute Infratest dimap in November. According to a current survey by the Institute Insa, 30.5 percent could generally imagine choosing AfD. However, 56 percent of those surveyed stated that they could generally not be able to imagine this.
The Mainz political scientist Kai Arzheimer recommends a look at neighboring European countries. Even where parties such as the AfD have been “existed for a long time and have been successfully normalized”, “so far has ended somewhere in the high 20s/low 30s,” he told the German press agency with a view to election results.
In addition, there is still a relatively large part of the population, “for whom the AfD is one of large parties right -wing party, and that makes them not clear for most who see it,” he added.
AfD with Union on paralyzing – long -term trend or snapshot?
It depends on. In theory, high survey values can generate “follow-up effects” and encourage people who have previously hesitated to also speak out for the AfD because it appears to be more socially acceptable.
A lot should depend on the so -called framework conditions: tightening or relaxing the economic crisis, internal and external security situation? Does the future federal government find answers to migration? What happens in Ukraine? Do the Union and SPD do the Union and SPD smoothly, solve problems or argue and block each other? The more crisis, the more likely it is more encouragement for the AfD.
dpa
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
