EU elections: Christian Democrats lead German polls while far right pulls into second place
New polling shows that Germany's main centre-right alliance remains comfortably ahead in advance of the EU Parliament elections this summer – but the country's far right is making gains at the expense of mainstream rivals.
According to Euronews's exclusive Superpoll, the country's Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), the backbone of the EU Parliament's European People's Party, are expected to be by far the largest party, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has moved into second place.
The governing Social Democrats (SPD) are in third place, and their coalition partners the Greens in fourth.
The Superpoll, which measures voting intention ahead of the elections, shows that the CDU/CSU's predicted share of the vote increased from 29 percent in March to 30.2 percent at the end of April.
It seems to have come at the expense of the SPD, the party of the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which has fallen from from 17 percent to 15.6 percent.
The party that seems to be losing the most ground are the Greens, whose number has fallen from 16 to 13 percent.
The centrist Free Democrats (FDP) is the only party within the current coalition that seems to be slightly improving in its popularity, growing from 4 to 4.7 percent.
The robust growth of the CDU/CSU is a boost to the current EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who is starting to contemplate the possibility that a centre-right grand coalition with the Conservatives group could replace the current grand coalition with the socialists and the liberals.
The extremes
As for the far-right Afd party, it is too early to say if a recent Chinese spying scandal has affected the popularity of Maximilian Krah, the leading AfD candidate in the EU elections.
Despite the arrest of one of his aides on espionage charges, Mr Krah is still running for the EU elections. The AfD's predicted vote share has been growing, and it has pulled past the SPD to be the second-ranked party.
Meanwhile, on the radical left, the migration-sceptic faction led by Sarah Wagenknecht seems to be losing support, though it is still outpacing the FDP and Die Linke, a decades-old member of the EU parliament's Left group.
