German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives could end up forming a three-way coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens, polling shows.
Such a "Jamaica coalition" - a reference to the black, yellow and green of the Jamaican national flag - is already under discussion in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein after Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) scored a decisive victory there on Sunday.
Some CDU parliamentarians, including Deputy Finance Minister Jens Spahn, say such a coalition could also be an option on the national level after September's election.
Wednesday's Forsa Institute poll, conducted for Stern magazine and broadcaster RTL before Sunday's regional election, showed support for the CDU unchanged at 36 per cent, while the Social Democrats (SPD), currently the junior partner in Merkel's "grand coalition", gained one percentage point to 29 per cent.
Both the conservatives and Social Democrats say they hope to end the current two-way coalition and lead the government with smaller partners after September.
The FDP and Greens both stood at 7 per cent each in the Forsa poll of 2004 potential voters, giving the three parties a combined 50 per cent, just enough to govern.
The FDP served as junior coalition partner to the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, for almost half of federal Germany's post-war history.
It dropped below the 5 per cent threshold for legislative representation in the 2013 national election but is expected to exceed it in September.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) dropped one percentage point to 7 per cent in the poll, which was conducted on May 2-5 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
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