BERLIN, April 30 (Xinhua) -- The official appointment of Andrea Nahles as the new leader of the German Social Democrats (SPD) has failed to improve the party's electoral fortunes, an opinion poll published on Monday by the public broadcasters "RTL" and "n-tv" found.
According to the poll conducted by the Forsa Institute, voter support for the SPD declined by one percentage point to 17 percent compared to last week. Furthermore, only 13 percent of respondents indicated that they would vote for Nahles directly as chancellor while 49 percent expressed a preference for veteran Chancellor and Christian Democratic Union leader Angela Merkel to hold the most senior legislative post in Germany.
By contrast, the levels of support for all other parties represented in the German federal parliament (Bundestag) remained unchanged. The CDU and allied Christian Social Union (CSU) led the poll with a combined 34 percent, followed by the Greens (Gruene) at 13 percent, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) at 12 percent, the Left party (Linke) at 10 percent and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) at nine percent.
"The expectation in SPD leadership circles that Andrea Nahles could provide the party with renewed momentum appears to have been disappointed so far", Forsa director Manfred Guellner commented on the findings.
According to Guellner, the poor results mainly owed to the circumstance that most German citizens and even the majority of SPD supporters did not trust the new party leader to introduce innovative impulses or future-oriented policy proposals given her 30-year career in the party apparatus.
