A new opinion survey in Germany suggests the country’s left-wing political parties can now gather enough votes to oust the ruling government of Chancellor Angela Merkel in September’s polls. The survey, conducted by the INSA institute and due to be published in the Bild newspaper on Tuesday, found that for the first instance “in a long time” a left-of-center coalition would gain sufficient support to force Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of office.

According to a report by the German daily prior to the release of the survey results, the country’s three left-leaning parties are now shown to have enough votes since the last election in 2013 to defeat rightist CDU and its sister Bavarian sister party in the next election.

In the 2013 electoral race, the leftist parties failed to form a coalition to defeat Merkel’s CDU party due to lingering opposition by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to alliances with the hard-left Linke Party. Support for all three leftist parties then dropped drastically following the 2013 poll and never recovered until this new survey.

The poll found that the SPD would win 31 percent of the vote, along with 10 percent support for the far-left Linke Party as well as seven percent of votes for the pro-environment Greens Party, adding up to a total of 48 percent and giving the edge to a leftist coalition in the September poll.

The right-wing parties, led by CDU’s 30-percent support, would then be left with 47 percent of the vote, the survey of 2,028 voters found. The remaining five percent would represent much smaller parties. Merkel, however, remains optimistic for a revival of support for her party before the fall election later in the year.

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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been summoned to stand trial over allegations of illegally financing his doomed 2012 re-election campaign. The prosecution case against Sarkozy claims that the former president extensively exceeded a spending limit of $24 million by using false billing from a public relations company named Bygmalion, an informed source told AFP on Tuesday.

On February 3, Serge Tournaire, one of two judges in charge of the case, referred the case to the court after Sarkozy’s legal efforts to refute the allegations failed in December, the source said. Instead of billing Sarkozy himself, Bygmalion is said to have charged $19.7 to the former president’s right wing Republican Party – called UMP at the time. The trial will focus on whether Sarkozy himself was aware of the fraud, as Bygmalion’s executives have already acknowledged the existence of fraud and false accounting.

During a questioning session by the police in September 2015, Sarkozy passed the entire blame on Bygmalion and the UMP and slammed the allegations against himself as a “farce.” He claims that he did not remember ever being warned about the accounting. Apart from the Bygmalion case, Sarkozy has been fighting several other legal challenges since losing the 2012 polls to President Francois Hollande.

After a period of retirement, Sarkozy returned to politics to take the helm of the Republicans and sought the nomination to run for president in the upcoming elections in April and May 2017. However, he lost the nomination to his rivals in the Republican Party, former Prime Minister Alain Juppe and ultimate winner Francois Fillon, in November.

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UK lawmakers have gathered in Parliament to debate whether the British government can trigger Britain’s formal exit from the European Union. A bill authorizing UK Prime Minister Theresa May to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty starts its route through Parliament on Tuesday and is expected to pass overwhelmingly.

Although most lawmakers campaigned before the referendum to stay in the EU, most, including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, say they will vote to uphold the referendum’s result. Opening the debate, David Davis, secretary of state for exiting the EU, told parliamentarians they could not block the Brexit process.

The decision to leave the block is “a point of return already passed,” he said. “At the core of this bill lies a very simple question — do we trust the people or not?” Members of Parliament have been given until Wednesday to discuss the proposed legislation that would allow May to trigger the Brexit process.

The British government was forced to bring legislation to Parliament after the UK Supreme Court ruled it could not trigger Article 50 without approval from the Parliament.  In a landmark referendum held on June 23, nearly 52 percent of British voters, amounting to more than 17 million citizens, opted to leave the EU, a decision that sent shock waves throughout the world.

Those in favor of a British withdrawal from the EU argued that outside the bloc, London would be better positioned to conduct its own trade negotiations, better able to control immigration and free from what they believe to be excessive EU regulations and bureaucracy.

Those in favor of remaining in the bloc believed that leaving it would risk the UK’s prosperity, diminish its influence over world affairs, and result in trade barriers between the UK and the EU. Retaining access to the single market has been one of the major worries for UK businesses ever since the referendum.

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Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has nominated Martin Schulz as its candidate to compete against conservative Angela Merkel for the post of chancellor in this year’s federal election. SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel announced on Tuesday at a press conference at the party headquarters in Berlin that the SPD committee had unanimously made the decision.

“Martin Schulz will be the SPD chancellor candidate for the 2017 federal elections. That is our unanimous party committee decision,” said Gabriel. Gabriel said Schulz “will also be the party chairman,” adding that the SPD is expected to confirm both his candidacy as well as his party leadership at a meeting on Sunday.

Following the announcement, Schulz said “it is an extraordinary honor that I, with pride and also with a natural humbleness, accept it and I will try and make the best out of it for our country.” Schulz also slammed Merkel austerity policies, which he said “have no doubt contributed to the deep crises in the EU since 2008, to the isolation of a dominant German government.”

Schulz, 61, a former president of the European Parliament, will run against Chancellor Merkel, 62, from the rival Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who will be running for a fourth term in the federal election slated for September 24.

The SPD and the CDU are the two main parties in the German parliament, known as the Bundestag.The SPD’s decision comes as opinion polls indicate Schulz is far more popular than Gabriel; however, other surveys suggest he still faces an extremely tough race against Merkel.

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