The short campaign for the early election on February 23 is coming to an end. The politicians don't have much time left to convince voters to vote for them. The incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, still believes that his center-left Social Democrats (SPD)will pull ahead and that he will also head the next government.

Given the current poll figures, this does not seem very realistic. In 2021, the SPD won the Bundestag election with 25.7% of the vote. In the current ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, it is down to 14%, which is one point fewer than the week before.

From February 10 to 12, the pollsters surveyed a representative sample of 1,579 individuals who are eligible to vote. The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian "sister party" Christian Social Union (CSU) have slightly increased their lead in the poll to 32% ( 1). The far-right populist

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