Shows possible coalitions that could be formed after Sunday’s election in Germany
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday urged Germans to give her would-be successor Armin Laschet their vote to shape Germany’s future, in a last-ditch push to shore up his beleaguered campaign 24 hours before Germans vote.
Laschet, 60, has been trailing his Social Democrat challenger Olaf Scholz in the race for the chancellery, although final polls put the gap between them within the margin of error, making the vote one of the most unpredictable in recent years.
In the last week of the campaign, Merkel took Laschet to her constituency by the Baltic coast and on Friday headlined the closing rally gathering the conservatives’ bigwigs in Munich.
A day before the vote, she had travelled to Laschet’s hometown and constituency Aachen, a spa city near Germany’s western border with Belgium and the Netherlands, where he was born and still lives.
– Climate high on agenda –
“For that we need new technological developments, new procedures, researchers, interested people who think about how that can be done, and people who participate,” she said.
Hundreds of thousands of people had descended on the streets on Friday urging change and greater climate protection, with a leading activist calling Sunday’s election the vote “of a century”.
“You’re going to have to keep mobilising, organising and taking to the streets,” she said.
Taking questions from voters in his constituency of Potsdam — a city on the outskirts of Berlin famous for its palaces that once housed Prussian kings, — Scholz said he was fighting for “a major change in this country, a new government” led by him.
Scholz, currently finance minister in Merkel’s coalition government, has avoided making mistakes on the campaign trail, and largely won backing as he sold himself as the “continuity candidate” after Merkel in place of Laschet.
– ‘Could backfire’ –
Laschet went into the race for the chancellery badly bruised by a tough battle for the conservatives’ chancellor candidate nomination.
But Laschet was seen chuckling behind President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as he paid tribute to victims of deadly floods in July, an image that would drastically turn the mood against him and his party.
Yet roping in the chancellor is not without risks, said political analyst Oskar Niedermayer of Berlin’s Free University.
“And it could therefore backfire because people could then think that Merkel is more suitable than Laschet.”
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