国际英语新闻:Germany's CDU losing support to Green Party: survey

BERLIN, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- Germany's governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has lost 37 percent of its former supporters to the Green Party, according to a survey published by the German opinion research institute Forsa on Friday.

Nine percent of Germans who used to vote for the conservative CDU would now favor the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, according to the Forsa survey sent to Xinhua.

Twenty-nine percent of former CDU voters would now even consider to waive their right to vote.

German voters from the social and political center have been "put off" by CDU leader and Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, said Forsa founder and Managing Director Manfred Guellner.

The CDU leader's "main mistake" had been to cater to the supporters of Friedrich Merz, her biggest internal party rival, by "pushing the party to the right," Guellner explained.

Only 14 percent would vote for Kramp-Karrenbauer if the chancellor were directly elected. "It is very difficult to get out of such a hole," said Guellner. It would be questionable if Kramp-Karrenbauer could do so while being in the "difficult office" as defense minister.

Currently, the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) potential candidate and Germany's Finance Minister Olaf Scholz is 20 percentage points ahead of Kramp-Karrenbauer's 34 percent in the polls.

At the same time, the Forsa survey also saw Kramp-Karrenbauer's internal rival Merz gain popularity.

A recent survey conducted by Civey found that the Green Party would receive 20.5 percent of the vote if national elections were held today, more than doubling their 2017 federal election result.

Although the Civey survey still found the CDU-CSU (Christian Social Union) alliance to be the strongest political party in Germany, support for the conservative union decreased by 5.2 percentage points to 27.7 percent compared to the 2017 election result.