The forecast over time shows the green candidate to rise sharply to be favorite and then decline over the last 2 months - what happened?
Also, there was a gender-related shitshow in Green primaries in Saarland. Basically the country leadership of the Green party hates the idea that a female #1 was voted out of the Saarland list three times in a row, thus giving an opportunity for a male candidate to lead the list (contrary to the Green rule that odd-numbered positions in a list, including #1, of course, must go to women). Saarland is small but still pretty prominent in German politics, generating a lot of federal-level politicians. And a lot of attention, because the story is pretty bizarre. The next chosen woman for #2, Irina Gaydukova, had a very bad interview that basically showed her unable to address very simple question and cast doubt on her ability to speak German at a professional level. It reminded some voters thad IdPol is sort-of tacky and the Green party is very deeply into IdPol.
Baerbock does not seem to be a very strong candidate personally. She was basically chosen over Habeck because she was of the right gender, not because of any obvious political advantage over him. But Germany has had 16 years of female chancellorship by now, so the idea of having a woman run the country is no longer particularly new or attractive.
But to be honest, all the leading candidates are fairly boring, perhaps with the exception of Olaf Scholz, who nevertheless leads a very dysfunctional party (SPD) and does not really have a shot.
So it is a fight between equals in mediocrity.
The CV irregularities seem to be rather minor (probably deliberate) miss-translations from English to German, if I understood it all correctly. Definitely not good, but hardly worthy of a proper scandal. The plagiarism stuff is all BS. Did someone use ctrl-c and ctrl-v? Yes. To an illegal or even immoral extent? IMO, no.
I do not judge her hard for that, but I am definitely interested in her reaction.
The position of a German federal chancellor is a "high friction" one. Whoever gets elected will be drawn into power games with Putin, Biden and Xi. This requires certain toughness and willingness to fight back smartly. I am not sure yet whether Baerbock has it; her experience with high-level political positions is very limited.
So the Greens had a good start but their candidate has no experience in government and has recently been painted as incompetent. She inflated some parts of her CV and apparently didn't cite all the sources she used for her book (even though she sometimes copied paragraphs almost verbatim). Nothing too bad, but it still doesn't look good.
I too was quite baffled when they went with Laschet. I've since heard the theory that the CDU leadership was worried that Söder would transform the Union party into an ego show like Christian Kurz did with the Austrian conservatives, or like Christian Lindner did with the German liberals. If they genuinely believe that threat to be worth taking serious, I can see why they would prefer Laschet. A one-man party is fine as long as the leader is going strong, but falls apart quickly when they disappear.
Guess the other party saw the numbers and activated its network to counter.
At the same time, the CDU started to enact some Green policies like raising fuel prices, but doing so with the hint that they would look out for the economy and the little man and be more responsible than the Greens. Since the greens also include some pretty radical eco-deindustrialist people, that move made the CDU look like a better alternative while still soothing peoples' bad eco conscience.
So yes, bad PR work by the Greens, good PR work by the CDU/CSU.
2) There were multiple corruption scandals coming to light in the ruling party: In spring 2020 the halth ministry ordered overprized masks from politically well-connected entrepreneurs. In a different story, multiple backbenchers and local politicans of the conservative parties had backroom deals with the Aserbaijani dictatorship. The conservative party in Germany has often been caught in corruption, but it seems to hurt them much less than the other parties.
3) The CDU/CSU elected a candidate who doesn't inspire much confidence.
The dip of the Greens can be explained by a mix of the rollout going well now, the scandals being forgotten again, and massive (social) media campaign against the Greens, often on the basis of false information. (Actually reminds me of Hillary's emails)