{"id":5602,"date":"2026-04-18T17:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/5602\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T17:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T17:00:26","slug":"poll-shows-germanys-afd-widening-lead-over-merzs-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/5602\/","title":{"rendered":"Poll shows Germany&#8217;s AfD widening lead over Merz&#8217;s conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has widened its lead over the conservative bloc of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, according to a new poll released on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">In the latest Sunday Trend poll conducted by the INSA Institute for the Bild newspaper, the party gained one point to reach 27%, while Merz&#8217;s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance slipped one point to 24%.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">According to the newspaper, this is the largest gap ever seen in a any of the INSA polls it commissioned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">On Friday, a poll from the German public broadcaster ZDF put the CDU\/CSU bloc at 25% compared to the AfD&#8217;s 26% &#8211; the first time the anti-immigrant, eurosceptic party was seen as Germany&#8217;s strongest party.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">The INSA poll showed the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) &#8211; the junior partner in the ruling coalition &#8211; was unchanged at 14%, followed by the Greens, also unchanged, at 13%. The Left Party gained one point to reach 11%.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">According to the research group Wahlen, in a hypothetical federal election held next Sunday, the AfD would garner 26% of the votes, beating the CDU\/CSU by one point.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Other research institutes also recently showed the AfD in the lead with 27%, with YouGov even reporting a gap of 4% over the conservatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has widened its lead over the conservative bloc of Chancellor Friedrich&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3437,480,668,393,5,5659,588,5442,3624],"class_list":["post-5602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-christian-social-union","tag-christian-democratic-union","tag-federal-chancellery","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-germany","tag-insa","tag-joint-press-conference","tag-micheal-martin","tag-social-democratic-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}