SPON survey: Most Germans consider Scholz unsuitable as chancellor candidate

Leading comrades were upset, the Jusos protested immediately: On the weekend surprised SPD vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz his party with the statement to trust the Chancellery. Many party colleagues criticized the initiative as unnecessary. After all, there are still more than two years to go until the next federal election - and the party leadership repeatedly emphasizes its desire to focus more on content than on personal discussions.

In the population, the opinion is quite clear when it comes to a possible chancellor candidate Scholz: Only a quarter considers the 60-year-olds for "more" or "definitely" suitable. This emerges from a representative survey of the online opinion research institute Civey for SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Nearly 22 percent of respondents, on the other hand, respond with "rather no", 42 percent consider the former mayor of Hamburg "in no case" suitable.

When evaluating the mood among SPD voters shows a split picture: About half of respondents think Scholz suitable for once to take over the office of head of government. For comparison: Chancellor candidate Martin Schulz had in a Civey poll shortly before the general election approval ratings of nearly 77 percent among SPD supporters.

That only about a quarter of the nationwide surveyed people thinks Scholz is the right candidate may simply be related to the stupid poll results of the SPD in the Sunday question: For months, the SPD is about 15 percent. This is also shown by the latest evaluation of the Sunday question. The comrades fight with the AfD for the third place in the survey ranking.

The situation in the Union is almost unchanged compared to the previous evaluation in December. It is gaining in trend slightly and currently comes to just over 28 percent - the election Annegret Kramp-Karren Bauer as the new party chairman has hardly caused any noticeable change.

The two most powerful are the Greens, who lose a bit, followed by the FDP and the Left.

Methodological notes: The SPON survey was conducted online in cooperation with the polling institute Civey from 7 to 8 January 2019. The sample consisted of 5008 respondents, the statistical error is on the Sunday question at 2.5 percent. For the Sunday question in the period from January 1 to January 8, the sample size included 11,881 respondents, the statistical error was 2.5 percent.

How does the Civey method work?

The polling institute Civey works with a multi-level fully automated procedure. All representative real-time surveys are played in a Germany-wide network of more than 20,000 websites ("Riversampling"), so it is not only users of SPIEGEL ONLINE questioned. Anyone can take part in the surveys online and will be considered with their answers in the representative result if they have registered. From these users, Civey draws a quoted sample that ensures that it matches the population, for example, in terms of age, gender and population density. Finally, in a third step, the results are weighted according to other socio-demographic factors and attendees' values ​​in order to correct distortions and prevent manipulation. More information can be found in the Civey FAQ.

Why is a registration necessary?

The registration helps to weigh the answers, thus allowing a result for the surveys, which is representative of the voting population in Germany. Each participant is asked for their gender, year of birth and place of residence. After that everyone can give their opinion in further surveys on different topics.

How do the results become representative?

The answer of each participant is weighted so that the result of a survey is representative of the population. The weighting is done fully automatically on the basis of the personal details at the registration as well as the history of previous answers of a user. More methodological details can be found in the Civey whitepaper.

Will you reach enough participants online?

Opinion polls are usually conducted by phone or online. The significance of the results depends on how many people can be reached and how many actually participate in a survey when they are approached. Internet connections and landline connections are currently about equally widespread in Germany - with about 90 percent of households, mobile phones even 95 percent. The willingness to participate in all methods in the single-digit percentage range, especially experts estimate it for telephone surveys.
Thus, for both methods, there is a group of people that can not be reached because they either have no connection to the respective network or do not want to participate in the survey. Therefore, a significant number of people must always be approached for a meaningful result. Civey surveys are currently in addition to SPIEGEL ONLINE in more than 20,000 other websites involved, including different media. This ensures that as many populations as possible can be reached.

How do I recognize the quality of a result?

Until the results of a survey become representative, there must be enough different people involved. Whether this has already been achieved, Civey makes transparent by a statistical probability of error is given for each survey result. The number of participants and the interview time are also published for each survey.

What happens with my data?

The personal data of the users are stored encrypted on German servers and remain secret. They serve only to weight the answers and to ensure that the surveys are not manipulated. To prevent this, Civey uses both statistical and technical methods.

Who is behind Civey?

At this point, readers in the app and on the mobile / stationary website have the opportunity to participate in a representative Civey survey. Civey is an online polling institute based in Berlin. The start-up cooperates with various partners, including SPIEGEL ONLINE as well as the "Tagesspiegel", "Cicero", the "Freitag" and Change.org. Civey is funded by the ProFit funding program of Investitionsbank Berlin and the European Regional Development Fund .