Germany’s Far-Right AfD party topped a major poll for the first time on Wednesday as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz was seeking to cobble together a coalition government to keep it out of power.
Support for Mr Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which won the February 23 election, fell by five percentage points to 24% while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained three points to land on 25%, according to the Ipsos institute’s poll.
The AfD came second in the election, the best performance by a Far-Right party since World War Two.
Its polling strength is a setback for Mr Merz’s conservative alliance, which wanted to win back voters from the party.
The Ipsos poll showed support for outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) unchanged at 15%.
AfD leader Alice Weidel hailed her party’s polling breakthrough in a post on X. “The people want political change - and not a ‘business as usual’ coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD.”
The centre-left SPD are in talks with the CDU/CSU to form Germany’s next government, with the two sides forced to iron out their differences in policy areas such as tax and migration to keep the Far-Right out of power. The talks are expected to conclude later on Wednesday.
Pressure to reach an agreement has taken on new urgency as the government will take charge at a time of global turbulence in an escalating trade conflict sparked by Donald Trump’s import tariffs.
“A possible trade conflict increases the risk of recession,” outgoing Finance Minister Joerg Kukies of the SPD told Deutschlandfunk radio.
Mr Merz, who called Trump’s US an unreliable ally after winning the election in February, has already vowed to build up defence spending as Europe faces a hostile Russia, and to support businesses struggling with high costs and weak demand.
As Trump’s tariffs on dozens of countries kicked in on Wednesday, European shares plunged, with Germany’s DAX down more than 2%, with France’s CAC and the FTSE 100 in London also falling by a similar amount shortly after trading opened.
Mr Merz’s coalition would be the only possible two-party majority that excludes the Far-Right AfD, whose support has surged on a nativist, anti-migration agenda and came second in the February election.
The coalition deal must still be ratified by a vote of the SPD’s membership.
If the SPD membership backs the deal, the Chancellorship would return to conservatives after the three-year interregnum of the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, whose tenure was marked by the economic and political fallout following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
But Mr Merz cuts a very different figure from Angela Merkel, the centrist conservative who ran Germany for 16 years before Mr Scholz.
Blaming her centrism and liberal immigration policies for the AfD’s growing strength, Mr Merz has promised that a hard line on deporting those illegally resident in the country and efficient government will turn the tide.
