Party polls: current trends for SPD, CDU/CSU, AfD, Greens & Co. (October 17, 2025)
Major polling institutes such as Forsa and Infratest dimap regularly survey voters in the "Sunday Question" on which party they would vote for if the federal election were held next Sunday. The RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) calculates the average of the past ten polls daily.
After the 2021 federal election, the SPD initially led the polls for a while, but was soon overtaken by the CDU/CSU. The Greens' post-election surge lasted even longer, but they, too, subsequently lost a significant number of votes. The third "traffic light" party, the FDP, also experienced a long-term decline, failing to clear the 5 percent hurdle in the 2025 federal election.
The biggest beneficiary of the traffic light coalition's losses is the AfD, which rose to the second-strongest party in the polls for the first time in mid-2023. However, at the beginning of 2024, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) lost several percentage points again. During this period, pollsters first asked about the new party BSW. Sahra Wagenknecht's coalition ultimately fell just short of 5 percent of the vote.
The surveys come from various polling institutes, each of which uses its own methods. Allensbach, for example, relies on face-to-face interviews with individuals selected according to quotas. Verian (Kantar Public, Emnid) and Forsa interview randomly selected individuals by telephone. Insa and Yougov rely on internet-based surveys of specifically selected members of a group. The panel usually consists of between 1,000 and 2,000 individuals. The results obtained in this way are usually modified based on various criteria to approximate the outcome of a federal election as closely as possible. The Research Group Elections weights the data according to factors such as gender, age, and education so that the results can be considered representative of the voting population.
The following graphic shows the latest election poll and the results of the most recent elections at the federal level, in the eastern German states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, and in Europe.
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