Factbox-Germany’s choice in surveys, data and facts

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(Reuters) – The elections in Germany gave the Social Democrats a narrow victory over Angela Merkel’s Conservatives, projections show, but polls for broadcasters conducted on Sunday indicated that voters had relatively clear ideas about the outcome they were going to get wanted to see.

SOCIAL DEMOCRATS WITH ADVANTAGE

An Infratest Dimap poll for ARD found that 38% wanted the SPD to lead the next government, compared with 28% who stood up for the Conservatives, and more than half wanted the Liberal Democrats and the Greens to be part of it .

Olaf Scholz from the SPD was preferred with 45% of the voters, Armin Laschet from the Conservatives with 20%.

While Annalena Baerbock of the Greens was the favorite of only 14 percent, 20 percent considered her party “the best answers to the questions of the future”, compared to 18 percent for the SPD and 14 percent for the Conservatives.

MERKEL’S SHADOW

Worrying for everyone who manages to build a coalition: 60 percent of those surveyed in the Wahlen research group in the ZDF exit survey thought that no one would be able to close the gap that Angela Merkel left after 16 years in office.

GENERATIONAL GAP

The same poll showed a sharp generation gap, with younger people tending towards the Greens and business-friendly liberals and those over 65 – a large part of one of the oldest societies in the world – tending towards the SPD and Conservatives.

PARLIAMENT SWELLING

ZDF estimates that the Bundestag will have 740 members – compared to 709 in the last parliament. A side effect of the complicated German electoral system https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/making-elephants-dance-guide-germanys-electoral-system-2021-09-23 is that the size of parliament can vary widely. If the left, hovering on the 5% threshold, does not come into the country, the parliament could become smaller.

CLOSE BERLIN RACE

The Greens could not do justice to their performance at the beginning of the election campaign when they vied with the Conservatives for the top spots. But they gave the SPD a tight run in their long-standing stronghold of Berlin: surveys showed that they lead the SPD just under second place in the city-state.

Failure of the former chief of espionage

In southern Thuringia, a controversial right-wing extremist former head of domestic espionage https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/blunt-outsider-heart-conservative-germanys-election-dilemma-2021-08-27 seems to have failed to win a seat as a conservative . Surveys indicate that Hans-Georg Maassen, who had to resign as Germany’s top Nazi hunter, is running behind local hero Frank Ullrich, a former GDR ski champion and SPD candidate.

HOME RUNS

In a constituency in Potsdam, a baroque city just outside Berlin, SPD politicians Scholz and Grüne-Baerbock were in a neck-and-neck race. There Scholz clearly defeated Baerbock and won 34% of the votes to their 19%. Both will definitely sit in parliament, but the defeat underscores that Baerbock failed to take advantage of their early advantage.

But Armin Laschet is lagging behind in his own federal state: In North Rhine-Westphalia, the Dutch western federal state in which he is Prime Minister, the conservatives are three percentage points behind the SPD, according to exit surveys.

With Merkel’s resignation, her own seat in the windswept Baltic Sea state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was on the agenda. It has held it since its inception in 1990. This time it looks like it will swing to the SPD.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; editing by Tomasz Janowski)