German AfD falls below 20 percent again in poll
Published: Tuesday, Jan 30th 2024, 16:10
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According to a Forsa survey, the right-wing populist AfD is losing popularity in Germany and has fallen below the 20 percent mark.
Compared to the previous week, the party again lost one percentage point and came in at 19%, according to the RTL/ntv "Trendbarometer" published on Tuesday. The SPD and CDU/CSU, on the other hand, both recorded a small increase of one point and landed at 15 and 32 percent respectively.
If federal elections were held on Sunday, the FDP and the Left Party would each receive 3% - a drop of one percentage point for both. This would mean that they would no longer be represented in the national parliament.
As in the previous week, the Greens remain at 14%, while the Free Voters and the newly founded left-wing populist alliance Sahra Wagenknecht are each at 3%. More than 2,500 people were surveyed by the opinion research institute Forsa from January 23 to 29.
Election polls are generally always fraught with uncertainty. Among other things, declining party loyalty and increasingly short-term election decisions make it difficult for opinion research institutes to weight the data collected. The institute specifies a statistical margin of error of plus/minus 2.5 percentage points. In principle, surveys only reflect the opinion at the time of the survey and are not a forecast of the election outcome.
The AfD had also slipped below the 20 percent mark in other polls. Since a publication by the Correctiv research center about a meeting between radical right-wingers and AfD officials around three weeks ago, protests and demonstrations "against the right" have increased. Since then, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets across Germany.
Founded in 2013, the AfD was only the fifth strongest party in the 2021 federal election with 10.3% of the vote. Since then, its poll ratings have more than doubled. The main reason for this is the sharp increase in irregular immigration last year.
The first real test of strength at national level will be the European elections, which will take place in Germany on June 9. In the state elections in eastern Germany in September, polls show that the far-right AfD has a chance of becoming the strongest party in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg.
©Keystone/SDA
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