NPD Overtakes SPD

The SPD has suffered a major shock in the German state of Saxony in a new poll conducted by the Forsa Institute. In results that is bound to reverberate across the whole of Germany, the far-right NPD has overtaken the SPD for the first time ever in an opinion poll.

It has been a rough few weeks for state Premier Georg Milbradt. The Christian Democrat prime minister in Saxony has had to deal with a corruption affair, a racially motivated attack on Indians in Mügeln that made international headlines and the near-collapse of the state bank, among other things. But even he would admit that losing two percentage points in the Forsa poll would be preferable to the result the SPD was presented with.

The popularity of Milbradt's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) dropped to 39 percent in the survey about political allegiance in the state. Social Democrats meanwhile face a nightmare scenario where they are now below their previous lowest level, dropping from 9.8 percent to just 8 percent. They now sit behind the NPD, which polled 9 percent of votes.

SPD drops below worst level in Saxony

In the state elections in 2004, the SPD recorded its worst result but even then it was marginally more than the NPD's 9.2 percent. While the far-right party has also dropped points in the current poll, the fact is that the SPD is now seen as even less popular than a right-wing extremist party in the state of Saxony.

The SPD was hardly a force to begin with -- sitting behind the CDU and the Left Party (27 percent) but ahead of the free-market liberal FDP (7 percent) and the Greens (5 percent). But the impact of being beaten further down, and by the far-right, will not only have implications in the state, but potentially across the country.

"The fact that poll shows the NPD ahead of us cannot be," Martin Dulig, the SPD's parliamentary faction leader in Saxony told German news magazine Der Spiegel's Web site. "I cannot be compared with Nazis."

The SPD has often questioned the Forsa Institute's findings, saying that it always gets terrible results in its polls. In other surveys in the state, the SPD claims, the NPD is clearly behind it.

Naturally, the poll was celebrated by the NPD which issued a statement calling the results "sensational."

NPD latches onto dissatisfaction with big parties

Werner Patzelt, a political scientist from Dresden, the Saxony state capital, told Der Spiegel that the figures were "dramatic" and that he thought that the question of social justice, the most important issue for many in the region, had driven the voting.

"The feeling among the populace is that the big parties do not act on its behalf in the state assembly in Dresden and the federal government in Berlin," he said.

The NPD has become increasingly aware of this dissatisfaction, Patzelt said, and was increasingly pushing a motto of "A strong state for the small man."