Rerun poll puts Scholz's party to test

BERLIN — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats, or SPD, faced the prospect of an embarrassing loss on Sunday during the rerun of a chaotic 2021 regional election in Berlin.

The German capital, one of the country's 16 federal states, had been ordered by the courts to return to the ballot boxes because the last vote on Sept 26, 2021, was said to have failed to meet basic democratic standards.

Opinion polls in the run-up to the election put the conservative opposition Christian Democrats, or CDU, in pole position ahead of Scholz's SPD, who came first in 2021.