Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) would beat the centre-left Social Democrats and become the country’s second-largest party if elections were held now, a survey found Monday.
The Insa poll, carried out for the top-selling Bild newspaper, put the AfD ahead of the crisis-wracked Social Democratic Party for the first time.
Support for the 153-year-old SPD has fallen from 20.5 percent in September’s general election to 15.5 percent, it found, while the AfD climbed from 12.7 to 16 percent.
Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc was largely unchanged at 32 percent.