Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel | Adam Berry/Getty Images Majority of Germans favor snap election: survey Only 27 percent say they want the current government to stay in power.

A majority of Germans favor a snap general election and ending the "grand coalition" between Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the Social Democrats, a survey has found.

According to a YouGov poll published Thursday, only 27 percent of Germans surveyed want the current coalition government to remain in power, while 52 percent prefer calling a fresh election.

The poll, which surveyed more than 2,000 people between Monday and Wednesday this week, came after Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) last month scored their worst-ever results in a European election, with 28.9 percent and 15.8 percent, respectively.

The SPD's leader Andrea Nahles announced her resignation on Sunday after the party's poor showing in the European vote and in a simultaneous regional election that saw the SPD lose control of the city state of Bremen for the first time in more than 70 years.

Among SPD supporters, 58 percent back a snap election compared with only 36 percent of CDU/CSU voters, the survey found. A snap election could hasten the end of the Merkel era, as the chancellor said she would not run again in 2021, the year of the next general election.

Asked about their preferred coalition government, only 9 percent of respondents told YouGov they want another "grand coalition."

The most popular option is a left-wing coalition between the Greens, the SPD and the far-left Die Linke at 25 percent, followed by a coalition between the CDU/CSU, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) at 15 percent, and a CDU/CSU-Greens coalition at 14 percent.

Among Green voters, 54 percent favor a Greens-SPD-Left government, while only 25 percent wanted a CDU/CSU-Greens coalition.

Greens-SPD-Left coalitions exist in several parts of Germany on regional and local levels — the Greens this week proposed forming such a government in Bremen — but has never been attempted in the Bundestag. Talks to form a CDU/CSU-Greens-FDP coalition after the 2017 general election ended in failure.

The Greens, which came second in the European election in Germany with 20.5 percent, have experienced a surge in national polls. The former protest party polled at up to 20 percent before the European election in late May, but a series of surveys this month have shown them at 25-27 percent — within spitting distance or even ahead of the Christian Democrats.

On Thursday, public broadcaster ZDF's Politbarometer survey of about 1,250 people put the Greens at 26 percent and the CDU/CSU at 27 percent. The SPD was tied with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a distant third place at 13 percent, according to the survey, which has an error margin of around 3 percentage points.

The polls project a meteoric rise for the Greens, currently the smallest bloc in the Bundestag. In the 2017 general election, the CDU/CSU won nearly 33 percent, followed by the SPD on 20.5 percent, the AfD on 12.6 percent, the FDP on 10.7 percent, Die Linke on 9.2 percent and the Greens on 8.9 percent.