Merkel Faces Toughest Challenge in Ten Years as Polls Begin to Slide

A new poll from broadcaster ARD and Deutschlandtrend put Schulz's Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) ahead of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), by 32 percent against 31 percent. A small difference, but a critical one, given that this is the first time the SPD has bested the CDU in ten years.

Experience Counts?

Prior to his time in the European Parliament, Schulz had been mayor of Wurselen Municipal Council, a relatively small administration in North Rhine-Westphalia. Schulz was elected to the European Parliament in the 1994 European elections and between 2000 and 2004 was chair of the SPD delegation. On 17 January 2012, Schulz was elected as President of the European Parliament, from which he stood down from, December 2017.

Although Merkel has far more experience in domestic politics than him — she has served three terms as chancellor alone — his intervention has boosted the SPD in a very shorty space of time and the closeness of the polling shows the threat he is going to be to her in the months ahead of September's elections.

Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Party held its annual conference, December 5-7, was boosted at the time by an opinion poll by DeutschlandTrend, which showed that 59 percent of those polled supported her bid to stand again for the Chancellorship of Germany in the 2017 election.

She suffered a huge blow in the September 2016 regional elections when her CDU party was beaten into third place in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern winning only 19 percent, overtaken by the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won 20.8 percent of the vote, coming second to her coalition partners the SPD, which won 30.6 percent of the vote.

Merkel came in for severe criticism for opening the floodgates to over a million migrants in the summer of 2015, precipitating the European migrant crisis. At home, she was panned for the crisis of federal states and major cities struggling to cope with processing the migrants, housing them and giving them basic assistance.