German anti-euro party at five per cent: poll

(BERLIN) - A new anti-euro party in Germany scored five percent in a poll published Tuesday, the level it would need to enter parliament in elections Chancellor Angela Merkel's government will contest in five months.

Support for the small Alternative for Germany (AFD) party -- which wants to ditch the euro and bring back the Deutschmark -- was up from three percent a week earlier in a survey by the same body, the INSA polling institute.

Top-selling Bild newspaper, which commissioned the poll, headlined its article about the party, which had its first congress on April 14, with "anti-euro party on the march."

Most polls give Merkel's coalition government only a narrow lead over its main opposition rivals -- an alliance of the centre-left Social Democrats and their preferred partners, the Greens party.

The new poll gave Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats 38 percent and their junior partners, the pro-business Free Democrats, five percent.

The Social Democrats scored 26 percent and the Greens party 15 percent, while the smaller Left party polled at six percent.

This means Merkel's coalition has a narrow lead of 43 percent against 41 percent for a Social Democrats-Greens alliance.

However, political scientists warn the new anti-euro party is a wild card that could rock that fragile arithmetic if growing support for the party eats into the traditional voter base of the Merkel coalition.

The AFD, unlike many eurosceptic parties in Europe, has so far stayed clear of the far-right fringe and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The early core of the party is made up of middle-class voters, academics and business figures.

The Christian Democrats' general secretary Hermann Groehe played down the threat posed by the AFD in comments published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily.

"With their four-page party programme, the AFD is more interested in protest than finding appropriate solutions," he was quoted as saying.