German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats are set to win this weekend's general election, according to the last released opinion poll released today. Germans go to the polls Sunday.
The poll by Allensbach, the only institute to have accurately predicted the outcome of the last legislative election in 1998, put the Social Democrats (SPD) on 37.5 per cent, half a point ahead of Mr Edmund Stoiber's conservative Christian Union alliance with 37 per cent.
The SPD lead is still within the margin of error, which is about three per cent, but it is the first time during the campaign the institute, which has links to the conservatives, has put Schroeder's party in the lead.
Allensbach said the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) would score 9.5 per cent, with the Greens - junior coalition partners in Mr Schroeder's SPD-led coalition, picking up 7.5 per cent.
If the figures prove correct, though, Mr Schroeder would not have enough votes to form a new majority government with the Greens. The FDP has said it would be prepared to govern with either the SPD or the CDU/CSU alliance, but Mr Stoiber has said the liberals are his partner of choice.
The poll, conducted for the Frankfurter Allgemeinenewspaper, gave the former communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) 4.5 to five per cent.
If the PDS fails to get into parliament, by not passing the five per cent barrier or having no more than three of its candidates directly elected, the majority of its seats would go to the winner.
The Allensbach poll also said that turnout would be 80 per cent, slightly lower than the 82.2 per cent recorded in 1998.
The newspaper did not say when Allensbach conducted the survey or how many people were surveyed.
A separate poll released earlier today also gave Mr Schroeder's SPD better chances of winning.
The survey by the Forsa institute for RTL television found 38.5 39.5 per cent thought the SPD would win and 37-38 per cent backing in the Christian Union.
While it was not technically a test of how people will vote in Sunday's election, the figures correspond closely to what voter intention surveys have been saying for the past 10 days.
AFP