Poll sees opposition Christian Democrats ahead in Berlin election rerun

BERLIN

A few days before Berlin's repeat election, a recent poll sees the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) well ahead of the SPD and the Greens.

The CDU, with top candidate Kai Wegner, gained one percentage point compared to the previous week and would come in at 25%, the poll by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen showed Thursday evening. The SPD of the governing mayor Franziska Giffey would be unchanged at 21%.

The currently co-governing Greens would come to 17%. Unchanged at 11% is the Left, which currently governs with SPD and Greens.

The right-wing conservative AfD is at 10% and the FDP at 6%. According to the survey, the other parties are at 10% overall.

Arithmetically, an alliance of the ruling coalition of SPD, Greens and Left would thus still be possible. A coalition of CDU, Greens and FDP could also govern, and a grand coalition of CDU and SPD would be just about enough.

In the 2021 parliamentary elections, the SPD achieved 21.4%. The Greens were in second place with 18.9%, followed by the CDU with 18%. At the time, the Left Party received 14.1%, the AfD 8% and the FDP 7.1%.

But the 2021 election was annulled by the German Constitutional Court in November 2022 because of too many mistakes and must be repeated on Sunday, Feb. 12.

Major flaws were found in both the election preparation and the process, which is why the Constitutional Court ultimately saw the only solution as a repeat vote. The rerun election is intended to restore a "constitutional state of affairs," the Constitutional Court explained.

In the 2021 election, for example, there were still long queues at polling stations after 6 p.m., even though the stations were supposed to have already closed. In addition, due to the complexity of the voting process, ballots were sometimes missing, which is why many votes were declared invalid.

Measures due to the coronavirus pandemic and the Berlin Marathon taking place at the same time made the chaos complete.

This year, the organizers promised that everything would go well and the election could take place without any problems. Special attention was paid to the processes during the election as well as the organization in the run-up.