A good month before the general election, the SPD is again the strongest political force in Germany on a Sunday issue for the first time in years.
In the trend barometer published on Tuesday by the Forsa Institute for RTL and n-tv, the Social Democrats come to 23 percent, the Union reaches 22 percent.
The SPD gained two percentage points compared to the previous week, the Union parties lost one point.
In the institute's data series, the social democrats land for the first time in almost 15 years on a higher value than the Union.
According to Forsa, the 22 percent now determined for the Union is the worst value that the institute, founded in 1984, has ever calculated for the CDU and CSU.
The Greens slide by one percentage point to 18 percent and are in third place. The FDP remains unchanged at 12 percent, the AfD at 10 and the Left at 6 percent.
Forsa said it interviewed 2504 voters from August 17th to 23rd.
Most recently, the SPD had caught up in surveys of other institutes and in some cases clearly overtook the Greens.
In the Sunday trend for the newspaper Bild am Sonntag, the Insa Institute had already seen Union and SPD on par.
Last week, the survey institutes Infratest-dimap and Emnid saw Union and SPD close together, while Allensbach and the research group Wahlen still measured a clear lead over the CDU and CSU.