About 20% of respondents said that if the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party wins next year’s chancellor election, its candidate Friedrich Merz should form a coalition government with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Merz has ruled out forming a government with the far-right party, several branches of which are classified as extremist or suspected extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence service.
The survey was conducted by the opinion polling agency INSA on behalf of the newspaper Bild and was published on Saturday.
About 34% of respondents said that if the CDU wins, it should team up with current Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), to form a government.
In the survey, Merz and Scholz both received 30% support, while 35% supported neither.
German chancellors are not elected directly by voters, but by the German parliament or the Bundestag. Usually, the party that gets the most votes tries to form a government by having other parties join a coalition.
Both Merz and Scholz did better than in the last poll. Merz and the CDU’s sister party, the Bavarian Christlich-Sozialunnik (CSU), rose by five points, while Scholz, who is seen as very unpopular, rose by nine points.
