A good year ago, the Allensbach Institute showed the Union had a survey lead of 24 percentage points over the SPD: 40 to 16. Even at the end of July this year it was still 30 to 16 percent.

And now the SPD is ahead.

The speed of change is probably what makes the Union people point out that there are still two weeks until the federal election.

When Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet was asked on Monday after the CDU presidium meeting how nervous the polls made him, he waved it off and said the voter would decide on September 26.

He did not mention that many postal votes have already been cast.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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In the CDU they collect every encouragement they can find. Laschet announced with satisfaction that Chancellor Angela Merkel would be involved in the CDU election campaign even more than before. There will be a joint appearance both in Merkel's constituency in Stralsund and in his constituency in Aachen. "The Chancellor is intervening in the election campaign, that is a good signal," said Laschet. He also announced that he would perform in Bavaria, the final rally of the election campaign is planned there anyway.

Laschet and the CDU deputy federal chairman Silvia Breher, who is a member of his “future team” for the election, presented an immediate program on Monday that Laschet wants to implement in the first hundred days of his reign if he is elected Chancellor.

The candidate for chancellor said that the six-topic immediate program will specify what is described in the election program for the entire legislative period.

Particular emphasis on family policy

After Laschet had so far always placed foreign and European policy in the foreground of the CDU program, these do not appear at all in the immediate program, instead family policy is given special weight. At the beginning of a Laschet government, the CDU wants to introduce a law to preserve the splitting of spouses for everyone, to raise the basic tax-free allowance for children to the amount applicable to adults and to increase child benefit. The paper is also about internal security. The CDU wants to buy a thousand new video cameras for train stations; Anyone who attacks emergency services should face a minimum sentence of six months in the future.

Laschet and Breher, who came from Lower Saxony, took the lead of the CDU over the SPD in Lower Saxony's local elections on Sunday as evidence that the CDU could win elections. The candidate for chancellor saw his appearance at the CSU party congress on Saturday in Nuremberg, at which Laschet received long applause from the delegates, as a sign of the union's unity.

Laschet switched to combat mode a few days ago. Already at the weekend he had a new sharpness in his tone. In Nuremberg he accused the SPD of having "always been on the wrong side" in all post-war economic and financial policy decisions. On Sunday evening in the candidate triumph on ARD and ZDF, he attacked Scholz several times. Laschet described the fact that the SPD was not ruling out a coalition with the Left Party but was withdrawing from the fact that September 26 was initially the day of the voters as “dishonest” and insinuated that Scholz would forge an alliance with the Left.