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Throughout the last decades, both the SPD under Schröder and the CDU under Merkel pursued a strategy of centrism to win over moderate voters from the other party. In the long run, the CDU was more successful with this strategy, mostly because leftwing voters were more willing to abandon the SPD for a smaller party (Die Linke/The Left) than rightwing voters the CDU. With the rise of the AfD though, this has changed somewhat.

The primary reason, in my opinion, why the SPD did relatively well in the last election (winning the plurality of votes, while being the weakest ever winner of the plurality) was that the CDU considered the Greens to be their primary challenger, focusing their attacks on them while sparing the SPD. As the Greens were in opposition while the SPD was in government alongside the CDU, there wasn't really any easy attack strategy the CDU could have pursued against both simultaneously.

Now though, the SPD and Greens are part of the same government, a government that has to deal with a lot of crises at once while dealing with infighting. This gives the CDU an easy avenue of attack. At the time, the CDU seems to also pursue a strategy of being more conservative to win back voters from the AfD.

Current polling could either be interpreted as the CDU's strategy succeeding, as the CDU leads while SPD and Greens trail far behind, or as a failure, as the AfD doesn't appear to lose any support. The main question is: where would the CDU stand if it had continued with its centrist strategy?