Chancellor Angela Merkel and her rival Martin Schulz rallied voters on the eve of Sunday’s vote, urging Germans to shun the first hard-right party expected to enter parliament in force since the end of World War II.
Merkel, the clear frontrunner after 12 years in power with a double-digit lead, also told her conservative base not to get complacent and to cast their ballots, rousing them with a folksy call to ‘bring home the bacon’.
Her Social Democratic (SPD) rival, Martin Schulz, in a passionate Berlin speech yesterday told voters to reject the ‘sleeping-pill politics’ of the famously cautious chancellor nicknamed ‘Mutti’ (mummy) and vote against ‘another four years of stagnation and lethargy’.