With the approach of the German legislative elections of September 26, The world keeps the campaign log. A daily update, with events, images, polls, clips, slogans, figures and keywords that allow you to follow and experience this electoral competition at the end of which Angela Merkel will leave power, after sixteen years in the chancellery.
No Tatort but a “triel”. Instead of the famous detective series that it has broadcast every Sunday since 1970 in prime time, the first public channel (ARD) welcomes, Sunday, September 12, the three candidates to succeed Angela Merkel: Annalena Baerbock (Greens), Armin Laschet (CDU-CSU) and Olaf Scholz (SPD). Dubbed “Das Triell”, this three-way debate will also be broadcast on the second public channel (ZDF), from 8:15 pm to 9:45 pm.
Two weeks before the elections, all eyes will first be on Armin Laschet, while the polls predict a historic debacle in the CDU-CSU: 20% of voting intentions, unheard of since the birth of the Federal Republic, in 1949. After the televised debate of August 29, on RTL, the leader of the conservatives had failed to reverse the trend.
Facing him, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz will be keen to preserve his position as favorite. However, it is not certain that he could be satisfied with the strategy which had been his during the previous debate, where he had deliberately kept back. Indeed, if the SPD is now in the lead (25% -26%), the latest opinion polls show that it is no longer making progress.
More worrying for Olaf Scholz: his personal rating is declining. According to the ZDF political barometer, published Friday, 48% of those polled want him to be the next chancellor, a drop of five points over a week. Armin Laschet, he is still far behind (21%), but he won three points.
Between the two, Annalena Baerbock will have to find her place if she is to achieve a breakthrough. On August 29, on RTL, the environmental candidate was combative, but that was not enough to relaunch her campaign. Credited from 15% to 17% in the voting intentions, the Greens are today in an ambivalent situation: if they are on the way to achieve a historic score (in 2017, they had obtained 8.9% of the votes), the sentiment that dominates nonetheless remains that of a missed opportunity for a party which, in the spring, seemed capable of arriving at the head of the poll, and therefore of leading the next government.
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