Germany's centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have moved ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in an opinion poll by the Emnid institute for the first time since 2006, Bild am Sonntag newspaper said.
The SPD's unexpected surge of some 12 points in the last month has caught Merkel and her conservatives off guard, analysts said, just seven months before the September 24 election, where she had expected to win a fourth term easily.
The Emnid poll of 1,885 voters gave the SPD 33 percent of the vote, up 1 point in the last week, while the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) would win 32 percent, down 1 point.
The SPD has now gained a record-breaking 12 points in the last four weeks, according to Bild am Sonntag newspaper, since former European Parliament president Martin Schulz was named as its candidate to run against Merkel in the September 24 election.
"The increase is unmatched in the history of the Bild am Sonntag polls," the newspaper wrote.
The SPD, junior partner in Merkel's ruling coalition, had trailed her conservative bloc for years in opinion polls until nomination of Schulz revived the party. It last won an election under Gerhard Schroeder in 2002. "This is a serious poll showing the SPD coming from nowhere to overtake the CDU/CSU," Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at Cologne University, told Reuters.
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