Germany’s Far-Right AfD party topped a major poll for the first time on Wednesday as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz was seeking to cobble together a coalition government to keep it out of power.
Support for Mr Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which won the February 23 election, fell by five percentage points to 24% while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained three points to land on 25%, according to the Ipsos institute’s poll.