Merkel’s bloc declines for 2nd straight week in polls

Bloomberg

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party bloc declined for a second consecutive week in a poll that suggests the Social Democrats are gaining ground ahead of Germany’s election in six weeks’ time.
The Social Democratic Party, (SDP) which hasn’t held the chancellor’s office since 2005, pulled ahead of the Greens for the first time in a year in the weekly Insa poll, Bild am Sonntag reported. Support for the SPD rose 2 percentage points to 20%, while Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc fell 1 point to 25%, its lowest level since late May.
Support for the Greens was unchanged at 18% and the Free Democrats were steady at 12%. The latest numbers suggest a possible post-election coalition led by the SPD with the Greens and Free Democrats as partners.
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in the September 26 federal election, is proving more popular than Armin Laschet, the head of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and her would-be successor. Merkel isn’t running for another term after 16 years in office.
If the chancellor were elected directly rather than by a vote of parliament, Scholz would receive 29%, an increase of 2 points from a week earlier, compared with 15% for Laschet, according to the poll.
“I think we can achieve a result of well over 20%” and form a government, Scholz said in an interview on ARD German public television on Sunday, citing Social-Democrat-led coalitions in Scandinavian countries with similar percentage shares. “I want to be the next chancellor.”
The August 9-13 party preference poll of 1,450 people has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.