Merkel, Schulz in final push for votes
BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her beleaguered rival Martin Schulz embarked on a final push for votes yesterday ahead of a weekend election, both seeking to beat back a challenge from the emboldened hard-right.
Merkel, who polls say will cruise by a double-digit margin to a fourth term tomorrow, will rally supporters in the southern city of Munich, at the height of the Oktoberfest beer festival.
Schulz, 61, a former European Parliament president and leader of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), will take to the stage in a central Berlin square in a last-ditch attempt to turn the race in his favour.
Despite Merkel’s commanding lead, the latest polls point to storm clouds on the horizon.
The anti-immigration, antiMuslim party Alternative for Germany (AfD) looks set to easily clear the five per cent hurdle to representation in Parliament in a historic post-war first.
The prospect of some 60 members of parliament, from a nativist outfit branded “real Nazis” by Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, taking seats in the Bundestag lower house has added urgency and angst to what had long been dismissed as a suspense-free campaign.
“Go vote and vote for the parties that are 100 per cent loyal to our constitution,” Merkel told Germans in a swipe at AfD.
“We have to take a clear stance when it’s about our basic values.”
The AfD is currently polling at between 11 and 14 per cent, deeply unsettling the mainstream parties that have governed Germany since the war.
A strong showing for AfD could eat away at Merkel’s lead.
With her Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, Christian Social Union, polling between 33 and 36 per cent, they risk hurtling towards their worst-ever score (35.1 per cent in 1998).
During her campaign rallies, Merkel was repeatedly confronted by organised AfD protesters, even dodging a few tomatoes while hammering home her stabilityand-prosperity stump speech.
The right-wing populists have seized on those disillusioned by Merkel’s 12-year tenure, and by her 2015 decision to let more than one million mainly Muslim asylum seekers into the country. AFP