Narrow lead

Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) hope to combine forces with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) to form a ruling coalition after the Sept. 27 general election.

Yet if the election was held today, Merkel wouldn't have enough votes, according to a new Emnid poll released on Thursday. Support for the CDU has dropped to a three-month low of 34 percent, according to the poll, which is the first to fully take into account the CDU's setbacks in Germany's recent state and municipal elections. The FDP held steady at 14 percent. Together, the two parties would pull in only 48 percent of the vote, just shy of a majority.

"I am quite sure Merkel will be re-elected but I'm a lot more cautious about whether she'll be able to get her preferred coalition with the FDP," said Frank Decker, a political scientist at Bonn University, told the Reuters news agency.

Yet left-of-center parties fall similarly short, according to the Emnid poll. The Social Democrats (SPD) would get 26 percent of votes if the elections were held today. The far-left Left party and the Greens are polling at 11 percent each. That also adds up to 48 percent.

Swing voters will decide the elections

Yet other polls still give the CDU and FDP an edge over the competition. The Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES) has said its research gives the CDU and FDP a 52.9 percent majority. Even so , the MZES' Ruediger Schmitt-Beck said that a conservative victory is far from a sure bet.

"German voters are becoming more willing to cross party lines than in the past," Schmitt-Beck said in an interview with Germany's dpa news agency. "And they're waiting until later to make up their minds."

More than 40 percent of voters decide which party they will vote for only a few weeks before they go to the polls, according to MZES research. That's a big increase in undecided voters compared to 2005, when 15 to 18 percent were undecided until late in the election campaign. In this election, nearly 10 percent of German voters will wait until election day to decide who will get their vote, Schmitt-Beck told dpa.

Conservatives losing ground?

Merkel hopes to avoid a repeat of 2005, when the Christian Democrats watched their modest lead slip away in the last weeks leading up to the election. In the end, she had to accept an uncomfortable coalition with her left-of-center rivals, the SPD.

Problems for the CDU started on Sunday, when voters gave its candidates the cold shoulder in several key state and municipal elections. The CDU clung to power in the eastern state of Saxony. But it lost support in Saarland and Thuringia.

th/Reuters/dpa
Editor: Chuck Penfold