German voters are going to the polls on Sunday amid predictions that the country’s far-right will win seats in the Bundestag for the first time in half a century.
Surveys show the populist Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party comfortably taking third place in the election, with a noticeable upward trend continuing into the last week of the campaign.
Angela Merkel is expected to be easily returned as Chancellor for the third election straight with a predicted 34 per cent over the vote, with her main rivals – and current grand coalition partners – the centre-left SPD set to poll a dismal 21 per cent.
The exact shape Ms Merkel's government will take after the election is uncertain, with an array of coalition options involving the SPD, the centre-right liberal FPD, or even the Greens, who sometimes cooperate with Ms Merkel’s CDU party at the state level. The final week of campaigning has also seen all the parties’ vote shares go volatile, raising the possibility of a last-minute upset.
Ahead of the election an average of major pollsters showed the far-right AfD on 13 per cent of the vote, ahead of left-wing Die Linke (11 per cent) the FDP, and the Greens (eight per cent). The results would leave the AfD, which currently has MPs in 13 out of the country’s 16 local state assemblies, with around 70 seats in the national parliament.
There has been speculation that the AfD could do even better than polls suggest, because of Germans keeping their support for the party secret. One survey commissioned by the tabloid newspaper Blid suggested that 40 per cent of Germans believe the party will do better than expected.
