Free Republic

As Chancellor Angela Merkel fights to save her government in a heated battle over immigration, an opinion poll Friday showed most Germans support the tougher line of her rebel interior minister. The survey found that 62 percent of respondents were in favor of turning back undocumented migrants at the border, in line with the stance of Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is openly challenging Merkel. And 86 percent want faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers, a process now often held up by bureaucratic hurdles and legal challenges, according to the Infratest dimap poll. The survey turns up the pressure on...

Germans increasingly see Russia as a more reliable partner than the US, a new study released on Saturday has found. The poll of 1,004 people by research institute Infratest dimap showed that 28 percent of respondents felt Moscow was a reliable partner, compared to 25 percent for Washington. The result is the first time the public’s trust in the US has fallen below Russia in over a decade. An Infratest survey of public trust in Germany’s global partners in June found both countries tying at 21 percent. France and Britain fared far better in the German public’s eyes. More than...

The German election has two faces. Most observers consider the race at the top over, with conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel running around 15 percent ahead of her Social Democratic (SPD) rival Martin Schulz. Yet skepticism remains about the accuracy of pre-election opinion surveys. After all, the overwhelming majority of pollsters failed to predict victories for the pro-Brexit camp in the UK and Donald Trump in the US. The methodologies used by German pollsters range from the telephone interviews employed by established organizations like Infratest dimap and Forsa, which have standing contracts with major news outlets, and online surveys used by...

There are crises everywhere you look these days: from the Middle East, with its constant political turmoil; to Turkey, sliding toward autocracy under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; to the US, where President Donald Trump appears to question the shared values of the West on a daily basis. Perhaps this is why Germans are apparently so happy to have Angela Merkel as their chancellor. In a new study conducted by polling institute infratest-dimap, in conjunction with German public broadcaster ARD, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) earned her best approval rating since the beginning of the refugee crisis in...