Elections | Low polls for the Berlin CDU – ordered by BSW

Does the Berlin CDU top candidate Stefan Evers have to fear a slap in the election? Photo: dpa Are the forecasts for the Berlin House of Representatives election on September 20th correct? The opinion research institutes see the BSW at three to four percent. The party would therefore miss out on entering parliament. But BSW state chairman Alexander King sees it differently. Even before the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, where his party was also at three to four percent and then achieved 5.3 percent on Sunday, King did not want to believe the surveys. He recalled the federal election in February 2025. The BSW was only certified at three or four percent at the time. The party prepared to publicly admit the painful defeat. But then it became very, very tight at just under five percent and the BSW repeatedly demanded a recount, and so far in vain.

Ahead of the Berlin House of Representatives election, the BSW regional association has now commissioned its own survey - from a "renowned French, globally active market research company," as the party announced on Wednesday. However, she doesn't reveal the name of the company, which is a bit suspicious. It will be an online survey carried out from August 21st to 26th. The evaluation is based on 1,091 fully evaluated interviews from Berliners who are eligible to vote.

The results can be better classified because, in particular, the methods that lead to the CDU's surprisingly poor performance are explained. While the Berlin CDU is still doing well in other surveys with around 20 percent despite a negative national trend and bad news, according to the survey commissioned by the BSW it is said to only receive 13.5 percent, i.e. it is actually plummeting.

When making forecasts, it is quite common not to simply publish how many respondents said they would vote for this or that party. Pollsters know from experience that, at least initially, not all AfD voters wanted to openly say so on the phone. They therefore corrected the value of this party upwards in their forecasts. Conversely, for the Berlin CDU, the good result in the 2025 federal election was only reflected to a limited extent in the forecast for September 20th. In Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU was polled at 22 to 23 percent, but then only received 17.2 percent.

"The result proves to be robust under different, methodically justifiable calculation variants and remains above the five percent mark."

The BSW achieved 5.5 percent in the survey it ordered and – if that really happens – would enter the Berlin House of Representatives with eight representatives. The BSW assures: "The result proves to be robust under different, methodically justifiable calculation variants and remains above the five percent mark."

According to this survey, the Left would get 22.3 percent. That would be only 0.3 percent less than the historic 22.6 percent in the 2001 House of Representatives election, achieved in the special situation of a CDU banking affair and with Gregor Gysi as the top candidate. The AfD would now receive 21.1 percent, the Greens 15.4 percent, the SPD 11.8 percent, and the FDP 4.2 percent. However, it should be noted that the error tolerances for such survey values ​​are up and down by up to 3.5 percentage points.

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