Election campaign in Thuringia and Saxony enters final spurt

CDU holds lead over AfD in Saxony

In Saxony, the CDU, which has Michael Kretschmer as head of government, is well ahead of the AfD with 33%. According to the survey, the Left Party would not be represented in the state parliament with 4 percent - the Greens and the SPD would each receive 6 percent. The BSW stands at 12% in the survey. The other parties together received 9 percent - including no party that would achieve at least 3 percent.

"In addition to the continuation of the government of CDU, Greens and SPD, there would also be an equally narrow majority for an alliance of CDU and BSW," the pollsters said. A coalition between the CDU and AfD would also be sufficient, but this has been ruled out by the CDU. But even in Saxony, 24% of respondents are not yet sure who or whether they want to vote for.

Party preferences hardly changed - despite Solingen

The values for the individual parties have hardly changed since the political barometer on August 23 - even though the new survey was conducted after the suspected Islamist attack in Solingen. On Friday evening, an attacker killed three people with a knife at a town festival and injured eight others. The suspected perpetrator is 26-year-old Syrian Issa Al H., who is in custody in Düsseldorf.

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. In principle, polls only reflect opinion at the time of the survey and are not forecasts of the election outcome.

Forsa head: uncertainty ahead of elections in Saxony and Thuringia

In the opinion of pollster Manfred Güllner, the outcome of the elections in Saxony and Thuringia is unusually difficult to predict. The influence of the terrorist attack in Solingen on the results of individual parties on Sunday is open, said the founder of the Forsa Institute on Thursday at a panel discussion of the German Press Agency in Berlin. "We have a lot of uncertainty anyway."

The two prime ministers - Ramelow in Thuringia and Kretschmer in Saxony - are both very popular. This also applies to supporters of other parties, but they did not vote for the incumbents. "This is a situation, a decision-making matrix, that we are not used to in the old federal states," said Güllner. "This creates a great deal of uncertainty as to whether the moods that we measure before the election are also reflected in votes." In case of doubt, we really have to wait for the election results, "perhaps also the final result, to know which coalitions are even possible".

"Considerations on tactical or strategic voting"

The Dresden political scientist Hans Vorländer expressed the expectation that the CDU could score points in Saxony with the migration debate. On the one hand, federal CDU leader Friedrich Merz gives the impression that he is taking the reins. On the other hand, Saxony's Minister President Kretschmer has always set the agenda himself. "Unless I'm very much mistaken, this will pull the CDU back up a bit," said Vorländer. "Whether it will be enough to make it stronger than the AfD is another question."

This year, there are a particularly large number of undecided voters, said the long-standing researcher at TU Dresden. And among these voters, "there are indeed considerations of tactical or strategic voting". The question is whether the CDU should be made the strongest force or whether the Greens and SPD should be helped into the Saxon state parliament "so that the CDU is not embarrassed to enter into talks with BSW".

Copyright 2024, dpa (www.dpa.de). All rights reserved