BERLIN (Reuters) - A new generation of German voters, some born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, are rejecting mainstream parties that have dominated post-war politics and giving their support to new groups on the fringes.
A survey by Infratest dimap released ahead of a September 27 election showed that among 18-24 year old Germans who have decided how they will vote, only 8 percent plan to support Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc -- the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU).
A meager 9 percent, meanwhile, say they will back the main center-left party, the Social Democrats (SPD), and their top candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
These younger voters will not have a huge influence on Sunday's election as they constitute a mere 10 percent of the voting population.
But their voting preferences send a worrying signal to the big parties that have run every government since the fall of the Nazis and suggest that the German political landscape could fracture further in coming years.
Richard Hilmer, the head of Infratest, said neither Merkel nor Steinmeier have targeted younger voters because they are not seen as a crucial bloc.
"The two main candidates don't make much of an effort to appeal to young adults, making them even more likely to try something new," said Hilmer.
They are turning to smaller political groups like the upstart Pirate Party, whose campaign centers on a rejection of censorship on the internet.
This month, German social networking website StudieVZ said that nearly half of the 200,000 site members who participated in an election survey supported the Pirate Party.
FRINGE GROUPS
According to the Infratest survey, some 28 percent of younger voters say they plan to back an eclectic mix of fringe groups that are not represented in the Bundestag lower house of parliament and have little or no experience in government.
Of the parties already in parliament, the environmentalist Greens are the most popular among young voters.
The average age in Germany is 42 and rising. That has encouraged politicians to focus on older groups, particularly senior citizens, who make up about a third of the voting public and are more reliable when it comes to voting on election day.
In SPD campaign posters, Steinmeier is shown with groups of elderly voters. With his shock-white hair, he blends in with the pensioners whose savings he is vowing to protect.
"They're just boring -- even the ad campaigns are dull, and they don't really speak to my generation," 19-year-old Anika Pankow, who works at a fruit juice stand in Berlin's Friedrichstrasse train station, said of the leading candidates.
This sense of disaffection stands in stark contrast to the U.S. election campaign last year, where enthused young voters played a key role in carrying Barack Obama to the presidency.
It is a warning sign to the CDU/CSU and SPD -- known in Germany as the "Volksparteien," or People's Parties -- who are struggling to stem a decades-long decline in support.
Established after the war to unite broadly Christian forces, the CDU and CSU's religious grounding has lost its appeal in an increasingly secular Germany. The SPD, which traces its roots back to the mid-19th century, has struggled to reconcile its socialist roots with the harsh new realities of globalization.
Together, the two parties represented a stability and continuity the country needed for the post-war decades.
In 2005, however, they won a combined 70 percent of the vote, a record low, and opinion polls suggest they could see their total sink to about 60 percent in Sunday's vote.
This decline has made it more difficult to form ruling coalitions at the federal, regional and local level. Four years ago, because of the drop in support, the big parties were forced into an awkward "grand coalition" with each other.
Now the differences between them have all but vanished in the eyes of many voters, adding to disillusionment and pushing the electorate to seek alternatives --- a trend experts say could become permanent.
"Voters rarely make radical shifts away from their initial picks, this generation included," said Karl-Heinz Nassmacher, a political scientist from the University of Oldenburg.
(Additional reporting by Ulrike Heil; Editing by Noah Barkin)
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