Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to elect her would-be successor Armin Laschet for the sake of German stability, in a strong pitch for her party as candidates made their final bid for support hours ahead of Sunday’s vote.
As hundreds of thousands of climate activists led by Greta Thunberg descended on streets across Germany to demand change and more protection for the environment, the outgoing Merkel acknowledged global warming was a major challenge.
But she said that protection was best achieved “not with bans and commands” but with technological progress, as she reminded voters that it mattered who led Europe’s biggest power.
In a strong appeal to a predominantly older electorate, Merkel said: “To keep Germany stable, Armin Laschet must become chancellor, and the CDU and CSU must be the strongest force.”
The candidate of Merkel’s CDU-CSU alliance, Laschet, 60, has been trailing his Social Democrat challenger Olaf Scholz in the race for the chancellery.
But final polls place Scholz’s SPD at 25 percent and Laschet’s conservatives at 22 percent, putting the gap between them well within the margin of error, making the vote one of the most unpredictable in recent years.
The Greens, polling in the mid-teens, were in third place, with a clear likelihood of being part of Germany’s next coalition government as a junior partner.
In the race for votes, Scholz, Germany’s current finance minister, said it was time for a “fresh start for Germany” after 16 years of Merkel at the top.
“We need a change of government and we want an SPD-led government,” he said
