Courtesy of Mish.
A week ago Merkel looked liked an extreme odds-on favorite to win the next German election.
As I pointed out, that was only because no strong outsider was willing to run against her.
That changed when SPD selected Martin Schulz rather than Merkel’s junior coalition partner Sigmar Gabriel as its candidate.
Polls now show Schulz overtakes Merkel in opinion poll as favorite for German chancellor
German voters would elect the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate Martin Schulz as chancellor if the country were to hold direct elections today, an opinion poll conducted for the German broadcaster ARD revealed on Thursday.
Schulz would receive 50 percent of votes cast while Angela Merkel, the current chancellor and head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), would receive 34 percent of the vote.
Careful!
One needs to be careful here because Germans do not directly vote for a person, they vote for a party.
Nonetheless, “Half of all participants polled also indicated a desire for the SPD to take over leadership of the federal government from the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. Only 39 percent of those surveyed thought the federal government should continue to be led by a member of the so-called Union of CDU and CSU parties.”
Coalition Math
