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Left party gains after Afghan strike row: poll

Other News Materials 9 September 2009 13:00 (UTC +04:00)
Support for Germany's far-left "Linke," or Left party, has risen to its highest level this year after a deadly NATO air strike in Afghanistan sparked a debate about pulling out German troops, a poll showed on Wednesday.
Left party gains after Afghan strike row: poll

Support for Germany's far-left "Linke," or Left party, has risen to its highest level this year after a deadly NATO air strike in Afghanistan sparked a debate about pulling out German troops, a poll showed on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Germany holds a national, parliamentary election on September 27.

The Left, the only mainstream party that is demanding an immediate withdrawal of Germany's 4,200 soldiers in Afghanistan, saw its support rise four points to 14 percent in the latest poll from Forsa for Stern magazine.

The survey showed Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who have ruled together for the past four years and favor keeping troops in Afghanistan, dipping one point each.

With a score of 35 percent, Merkel's conservatives would still have enough to form a narrow parliamentary majority with their favored partners, the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), on 14 percent.

But the poll is the first to show that the row over the Afghan air strike, which has led some opposition parties to call for the resignation of conservative Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, may be having an influence on voters.

The German government has said its troops called in the air strike on two hijacked fuel trucks near Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, to protect themselves from a possible suicide attack by Taliban fighters.

Germany has said it believes 56 people were killed in the strike but Afghan rights bodies have estimated the toll to be far higher.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has announced a formal investigation into the incident and said Tuesday for the first time that it believed civilians were among the dead.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the strike a major "error of judgment" and some of Germany's European allies have also been critical, but Merkel defended it in a speech to the Bundestag lower house of parliament on Tuesday.

The Forsa poll of 2,504 Germans was conducted from September 1-7.

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