According to a poll published on Friday, the SPD is now well ahead of the competition with a 25 percent share of the vote. According to the ZDF “Politbarometer”, the CDU and CSU remain at a historically weak 22 percent.
Even in the final spurt of the election campaign, Vice Chancellor Scholz would like to remain true to his rather calm manner. “The voters do not want anyone who spits big tones or scolds, but it is about the leadership of our country in difficult times,” said Scholz of the German press agency in Berlin.
He accused his competitor Laschet of not following up on climate protection announcements. Scholz emphasized that it will “not succeed on its own” to make Germany climate neutral by 2045. “And it will certainly not succeed with the CDU and Armin Laschet, whose attitude to climate policy is quite changeable.”
Laschet, meanwhile, presented an eight-person team around ex-Union parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz (CDU) and Digital State Minister Dorothee Bär (CSU) for the decisive phase of the election campaign. The “future team” should hold all the party wings together and at the same time provide new ideas for the future, said Laschet. They are experts who do something other than “experiments of an ideological nature”.
In addition to Merz and Bär, the team also includes terrorism expert Peter Neumann, Schleswig-Holstein’s education minister Karin Prien, Saxony’s minister of culture Barbara Klepsch, CDU deputy chairman Silvia Breher, Union parliamentary group deputy Andreas Jung and music manager Joe Chialo, who is in Berlin-Spandau for a Bundestag mandate running.
Laschet spoke of a “directional decision” with a view to the election in three weeks’ time. He and his team want to fight “that there will be no left alliance in Germany on September 26”.
According to a survey, however, voters would prefer a left alliance to a Union-led three-party alliance: According to a survey by the polling institute YouGov, one in five would fully or at least support a coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Left. About a “Jamaica coalition” of the CDU / CSU, the Greens and the FDP says only a little more than one in eight.
The SPD chairman Norbert Walter-Borjans does not want to rule out a coalition of his party with the Greens and the Left either. “We’ll talk to everyone, that’s probably normal,” he said on ARD. “We’re not going to surrender ourselves to one side by saying we certainly don’t talk to the other.” Scholz had not ruled out a left alliance, but emphasized several times that the government partners would have to commit to NATO, among other things. The left demands that Germany leave NATO. According to the “Politbarometer”, a red-green-red alliance would currently have a majority.