65 percent of German voters in favour of raising taxes on high-income earners

A representative survey has found that 65 percent of voters in Germany are in favour of raising taxes for the country’s high-income earners.

Germany discusses raising taxes for high-income earners

According to a representative poll of 1.342 people on September 1 and 2, 65 percent of voters in Germany are in favour of raising taxes for high-income earners. Among respondents who said they vote for the CDU, 66 percent were in favour of the policy.

The ARD-DeutschlandTrend is a regular representative survey which asks the German electorate about their voting intentions and opinions on specific policies widely discussed in the past week.

Germany’s CDU-SPD coalition government is currently looking for ways to fill a 30-billion-euro deficit in its 2027 budget. In May, the two parties announced their coalition agreement, which did not include any tax increases.

But in a late-August ZDF interview, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil (SPD) said that his party wouldn’t “take any option off the table” while looking for the extra funds. “The SPD has always been of the opinion that high earners and people who have large assets [...] should contribute a portion of these so that society can be more equal.”

On September 1, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) rebuffed Klingbeil’s suggestion. "We have a coalition agreement, and we have agreed in this coalition agreement that taxes will not be raised. [...] And this coalition agreement stands,” he told ZDF.

But the recent poll suggests that voters in Germany do have an appetite for the policy, even many of those who support Merz’s centre-right, conservative party. Among the respondents who said they vote SPD, 84 percent were in favour, 88 percent among Greens voters, 84 percent among The Left Party voters and 40 percent among AfD voters.

AfD support inches closer to CDU in September’s ARD-DeutschlandTrend

The recent ARD-DeutschlandTrend survey also found support for the far-right, populist AfD to be rising once again. For the Sonntagsfrage, pollsters call landlines and mobile phones, and conduct interviews online to ask the electorate who they would vote for if there were a federal election (Bundestagswahl) on the coming Sunday.

The CDU remained in first place and retained the 27 percent it held in the August Sonntagsfrage poll, while the AfD came in second and gained one percentage point for a total of 25 percent, and the SPD came in third and gained one percentage point for a total of 14 percent.

The Greens lost one percentage point for a total of 11 percent, The Left Party’s results were unchanged from August (10 percent), BSW gained one percentage point for a total of 4 percent and the FDP lost one percentage point for a total of 3 percent of the vote.