A week before Saxony-Anhalt votes, a poll for ZDF puts the AfD — classified by the state's constitutional protection office as confirmed right-wing extremist — at 40 percent, and the chancellor party's state branch, the CDU under Sven Schulze, at 23. That is short of the absolute majority the AfD has said it wants, and it would be the first time the party takes a state premiership if it got one.
A different institute gives different numbers. The earlier ARD poll had the AfD at 42 and the CDU at 22, a gap of 20 points rather than 17. The smaller parties move too: the Left at 13 in one and 11 in the other, the SPD at nine and eight, the Greens at six in both, and in the ZDF poll the FDP and the BSW both land on three and miss the parliament.
Set against either gap is a third figure. Thirty-one percent of those asked told ZDF they do not yet know whom, or whether, they will vote for. The poll surveyed 1,053 eligible voters from Tuesday to Thursday, and the broadcaster puts the error range at a good three points where a party is near 40 percent and a good two where it is near ten.
Which parties clear the five percent threshold decides what is possible afterwards, because every other party has ruled out a coalition with the AfD. n-tv sets out the arithmetic: a CDU-SPD-Green minority government tolerated by the Left is conceivable. Der Spiegel looks at the same numbers and asks a question rather than answering it — the shrunken SPD and the Greens are both above the threshold while the more AfD-friendly BSW is below it, and is that already an anti-AfD effect? As things stand, it notes, the CDU needs both of them to build anything against Ulrich Siegmund's AfD, and would still depend on the Left to tolerate it.
One more answer runs against the vote shares. Asked which party should lead the next state government, 50 percent said the CDU and 35 percent the AfD.
Why it is on the board
In the German video lens when we collected — a clip on how young people in Saxony-Anhalt are experiencing the run-up — with the election also on Der Spiegel's most-read list at seventh and n-tv's at tenth.
The German list is otherwise about somewhere else. Of the seventeen items we held, four are the Norwegian succession — the new queen, the death twice, and what happens next — and an eleventh is the death of a king in Uganda. One is the American immigration arrest we carried on the US board today.
확인: n-tv · Der Spiegel