In the survey, the CDU is ahead of the Greens for the first time in six years

The CDU has overtaken the Greens in Baden-Württemberg in the SWR survey for the first time in several years. If the state election were next Sunday, the CDU would get 27 percent, an increase of one percentage point compared to October. The Greens, on the other hand, lose one percentage point and come to 26 percent.

This is the result of a representative survey conducted regularly by Infratest Dimap on behalf of SWR and "Stuttgarter Zeitung", which was published on Thursday. For the first time since 2017, the Christian Democrats are ahead of the Greens in the “BW trend”. The Social Democrats are in third place with an unchanged 15 percent, followed by the AfD with 12 percent and the FDP with 10. The Left Party is not reported as a party in its own right, it is one of the other parties that together also make up 10 percent.

Even if his party falls behind in the favor of voters: Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) gained three percentage points in popularity, to 57 percent. Just under a third of respondents (32 percent, -7 since autumn) would like him to leave office before the end of the legislature. 59 percent want him to remain in office until 2026. Kretschmann, almost 75 years old, does not want to run again in the state elections.

Satisfaction with CDU state chief and deputy head of government Thomas Strobl is also increasing: the interior minister improved by three percentage points to 27 percent. According to the survey, the leaders of the state parliament opposition are still struggling with awareness problems: the SPD parliamentary group leader Andreas Stoch is therefore unknown to more than half of those surveyed, and only four out of ten can give an opinion on the FDP parliamentary group leader Hans-Ulrich Rülke.

In recent years, the CDU has mostly lagged behind the Greens in polls from various institutes. In a survey by the opinion research institute Insa for the “Bild” in November 2022, the CDU was 28 percent ahead of the Greens with 26 percent. Shortly after the bankruptcy in the 2021 federal election, the Christian Democrats in the southwest were at 17 percent. The next state election in Baden-Württemberg is in 2026.

Many people in the south-west take a critical view of immigration and how migrants are treated. Similar to 2016, around every second person (48 percent) is critical of the further admission of migrants and refugees in the south-west, 42 percent are of the opinion that Baden-Württemberg should continue to take them in. In December 2015, 42 percent of those entitled to vote were still of the opinion that the state government and administration had the refugee situation under control, but currently one in three (33 percent) expresses the same opinion.

For the SWR survey, a total of 1178 people in Baden-Württemberg were interviewed between March 16th and 21st.