Chancellor Angela Merkel and her rival Martin Schulz rallied voters on the eve of tomorrow'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".
Both agree that voters must resist the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has railed against the influx of around one million mostly Muslim migrants and refugees, half of them from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain's UKIP has been polling at 11-13 per cent and is expected to enter the opposition benches of the Bundestag, heightening its visibility and state financing.
The International Auschwitz Committee warned that the "conglomerate of anti-Semites, enemies of democracy and nationalistic agitators" will bring "an inhuman coldness" to the glass-domed chamber of the Reichstag building.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
