BERLIN—Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats, saw its rating fall below that of the right-wing Alternative for Germany for the first time in an opinion poll published Monday, piling fresh ignominy on the country’s disintegrating center-left. The news came on the day German Chancellor Angela Merkel appointed a new secretary general at her Christian Democratic Union, the country’s other big mainstream party, in a move widely interpreted as a first step toward engineering her succession and silencing ever louder...

Source: Wall Street Journal February 19, 2018 18:11 UTC