BERLIN, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Almost as many German voters could imagine voting for the Green party as for the CDU/CSU conservative union, according to a survey conducted by the Forsa institute published on Monday.
The survey respondents could express multiple preferences. At 38 percent, the voter potential of the Green party was almost as large as that of the governing CDU/CSU with 39 percent, according to the Forsa poll conducted on behalf of German television stations RTL and n-tv.
31 percent of German voters could imagine voting for the conservative union's coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPD).
"The Greens already won over 20 percent of the voter potential in 2010 and 2011. At that time, the issue was the extension of the operating life of nuclear power plants, i.e. a single issue. Now it is different, the Greens do not have just one subject," Manfred Guellner, head of the Forsa institute, told Xinhua on Monday.
The Greens were now "experiencing a kind of second birth, because voters of the liberal center do not feel represented by other parties. We saw recently in Bavaria and Hessen that there are many dissatisfied CDU/CSU voters, and we also see this tendency countrywide. There is a higher probability that the Greens will maintain their upward momentum," said Guellner.
Potential Green voters were most likely to live in west Germany, be women, or be 18 to 29 years old as well as have a secondary school education or higher, according to Forsa.
Nonetheless, Forsa found that the number of German voters who would actually vote for the respective parties was smaller than the number of potential voters. According to the poll, only 20 percent of Germans would actually vote for the Greens, 28 percent for the CDU/CSU and 16 percent for the SPD.
