FROM OUR MAIL
BERLIN – 60.4 million Germans will be able to vote for the Bundestag at 60,000 seats from 8 to 18: urged by the President of the Federal Republic Frank-Walter Steinmeier to go to the polls because, as he wrote in Bild am Sonntag, “Every vote counts, your vote counts”.
Never so many undecided
In some large cities, 60% had already voted in Munich at noon, only 27.4% in Cologne. Never before in these elections, with such an uncertain outcome until the end, will the votes weigh, especially those of the undecided who represent a large slice of the electorate, 40% according to experts’ estimates, an unprecedented share. Uncertainty marked the pace of the entire electoral campaign, with unprecedented swings in the polls, confirming the rampant indecision among voters who for the first time since 2005 will no longer be able to count on the guidance of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Loading…
Cdu in trouble, Spd returns
The Union of Christian Democrats CDU-CSU went up and down and from the peak just close to 40% in the middle of the pandemic, it then collapsed to just over 20% and is preparing for the worst, the worst outcome since the postwar period. In the latest polls it has recovered 2-3 percentage points, and the fluctuation band has narrowed between 21% and 25%.
On the other hand, the SPD has exceeded expectations, in a positive key, with an unprecedented comeback: for a long time around 14-16%, it orbited in the polls between 25% and 26%. The Verdi Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen took the opposite path of the SPD: from the peak of 26%, they settled in the latest surveys between 14% and 16%. The Fdp liberals have consolidated a stable approval rate between 10% and 13%. The same can be said for the far-left party Die Linke (5-7%) and the far-right AfD (10-12%).
Decisive postal vote
In the 2017 Bundestag elections, CDU-CSU was the first party with 32.9%, Spd second at 20.5%, AfD third at 12.6% followed by Fdp (10.7%), Die Linke ( 9.2%) and the Greens last with 8.9%. Voter turnout was 76.2% four years ago, and voting by mail also makes these elections exceptional – mail-order voting could hit a record. According to the Federal Election Committee, this time at least 40% of the votes will come through the postal system: this is also due to the pandemic. In 2017, 28.6% of eligible voters used postal voting.