BERLIN: Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel has endorsed her conservatives’ candidate to replace her a day before the country’s electorate paves the way for a new government.
“Tomorrow is about Germany remaining stable,” Merkel said on Saturday at a rally for Armin Laschet in his hometown of Aachen.
She said Laschet’s tenure as premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia had been characterized by “building bridges” and that he had shown in his entire political life that he stood for solidarity, not only theoretically, “but with passion and heart.”
Merkel is leaving office after 16 years in power. The conservative CDU/CSU bloc is trailing the centre-left SPD in the most recent polls by only a few percentage points.
Also speaking at the event in Aachen, Laschet said: “If you want stability in Germany, the CDU/CSU must be in first place tomorrow.”
He added that a leftist coalition is a realistic possibility if the SPD, the Greens and the far-left Die Linke manage to garner enough votes in Sunday’s election.
Olaf Scholz, the SPD’s candidate, is also due to appear at his final campaign event later on Saturday in the state of Brandenburg.
The third candidate for chancellor, the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock, officially wrapped up her campaign on Saturday. Now sitting at a distant third in the polls, she is seen as unlikely to have a shot at the chancellorship.
But her party is expected to vastly improve its electoral share compared to the last elections in 2017, and even be part of a future coalition government.
In light of the large numbers of undecided voters in Germany, the outcome of the poll is considered to be impossible to predict. Polling has often been inaccurate in the past.
Most observers expect the result of the vote to be a three-way coalition, but it’s not clear who will be in it.
If Laschet’s bloc of Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) manages to take the lead, then it is likely to be a centre-right coalition.
If the SPD triumph, then Germany could swing slightly or strongly to the left, depending on who Scholz chooses as his coalition partners.
Another option is that Germany continues its current “grand coalition” of SPD and CDU/CSU.
In a continuation of a campaign tactic employed by the conservatives, CDU general secretary Paul Ziemiak warned against a left-wing coalition on Saturday.
He told the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper that a victory by the SPD would mean that about 50 members of the party’s youth wing, considered to be markedly more left-wing than the party itself, would enter parliament.
This would mean a “massive shift to the left,” Ziemak said.
Meanwhile, SPD secretary-general Lars Klingbeil claimed that the CDU/CSU conservative bloc was “broken and devoid of ideas after 16 years of Merkel” and that it was necessary for them to go into opposition. — dpa
