Germany’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) slightly narrowed their gap with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in a poll published on Tuesday five days before a federal election.
The weekly survey, conducted by Forsa for RTL television and Stern magazine, showed support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) bloc down one percentage point at 36% while the SPD was unchanged on 23%, Reuters reported.
The far-left party Die Linke scored 10%, which would make it the third-strongest political force in the next Bundestag lower house of parliament.
The business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is critical of the European Union, both came in at 9%. The environmentalist Greens stood at 8%.
This means that only another grand coalition of Merkel’s conservatives with the SPD or a nationwide untested three-way “Jamaica” alliance of the conservatives, FDP and Greens would have a stable majority, the pollster said.
The poll of a representative sample of 2,501 people was conducted between September 11 and 15. It had a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points.
Jamaica coalition is a term in German politics describing a coalition among the parties of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the Green Party.
The term refers to an association between the symbolic colors of the parties in such a coalition —black for the conservative CDU/CSU; yellow for the liberal FDP; and green for the Green Party— and the colors of the flag of Jamaica. It also alludes to the perception (from a German point of view) of such an alliance as an “exotic” constellation.
