On Sunday, Bavarians will be voting for their next state government. As one of Germany's biggest and richest states, elections here have been closely watched by Berlin.

Historically the Christian Social Union (CSU) has governed the state with an absolute majority so their politics have also influenced federal decisions.

Roughly 9.4 million eligible Bavarians will vote at one of more than 10,200 polling stations for both a district and state representative who will govern the Alpine state for the next five years.

While the CSU is again polling well ahead of all other parties, they are unlikely to win a majority on Sunday.

For the past five years the center right party has run Bavaria in a coalition with the populist Free Voters, who find most of their support in rural areas of the state.

The Green Party is also polling above average with 15 percent in public option surveys. However, center-left parties have traditionally struggled in Bavaria, one of the most conservative states in the country.

At the same time, a noticeable increase in popularity for the far right Alternative for Deutschland party is being met with resistance by many voters.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in the state capital Munich earlier in the week to demonstrate against the rise they are seeing in support for the far right.

It was attended by a vast demographic of people, including professors and well known personalities, such as popular German comedian Michael Mittermeier, who said the demonstration was a way of "informing" those supporting the far right about their program.

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"Sometimes they just vote for this party, the AFD," Mittermeier told CGTN on the sidelines of the demonstration, "and they think 'yeah I protested against the government', but they don't know what their program is and if you read this program, it's not very nice."

For some voters, these elections are turning into a referendum against the coalition government in Berlin, known as the traffic light coalition for their party colors, says Professor Dr Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education in Bavaria.

"What is interesting is that these are state elections," she explains, "so the topics of education, schools, internal security, these are state issues, but they're not playing a big role. What's quite a big theme is 'are we for the traffic light parties in the federal government or against it?'"

In 2018, the CSU won by their lowest margin ever with 37 percent of the votes. For CSU front man Markus Söder, chair of the party since 2019, this election is a chance for him to prove that the CSU is still the party for the Bavarian people, but can he?

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