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Angela Merkel called for Armin Laschet to vote.
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday urged the Germans to give her future successor Armin Laschet their vote to shape Germany’s future, in a last ditch effort to consolidate her besieged campaign 24 hours before the Germans vote.
Laschet, 60, drags his Social Democratic challenger Olaf Scholz in the chancellery race, though final polls put the gap between them within the margin of error, making the vote one of the most unpredictable of recent times years.
Merkel had planned to keep a low profile in the electoral battle as she prepares to step down from politics after 16 years in office. But she found herself drawn into the frantic campaign schedule of her party’s unpopular president, Laschet.
In the last week of the campaign, Merkel took Laschet to her constituency on the Baltic coast and was headlining the closing rally of the Tory bigwigs in Munich on Friday.
Merkel tugged at the heartstrings of the predominantly older German electorate on Friday, calling on them to keep her conservatives in power for the sake of stability – a hallmark of Germany.
The day before the vote, she had traveled to the hometown and constituency of Laschet, Aachen, a spa town near Germany’s western border with Belgium and the Netherlands, where he was born and still lives.
“It is about your future, the future of your children and the future of your parents,” she said at her last rally before the elections, calling for a strong mobilization for her conservative alliance .
– Climate tops the list –
She stressed that climate protection would be a major challenge for the next government, but that it would not be done “simply by rules and regulations.
“For that, we need new technological developments, new procedures, researchers, interested people who think about how it can be done and people who participate,” she said.
Laschet is a “bridge builder who will get people on board” to shape Germany to meet these challenges, she said.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on Friday to demand change and greater climate protection, with one leading activist calling Sunday’s election a “century-old” vote.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg told a rally near Germany’s Garzweiler mine, one of the largest in Europe, on Saturday that the elections “are not going to solve the crisis, whatever the outcome. “.
“You are going to have to continue to mobilize, organize and take to the streets,” she said.
As time is running out ahead of the elections, Scholz was also staying close to his home across the country to chase the last votes.
Responding to 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.
He also gave an overview of the future government he hopes to lead, saying that “maybe it will be enough, for example, to form a government between the SPD and the Greens”.
Scholz, currently finance minister in Merkel’s coalition government, avoided making mistakes during the election campaign and gained widespread support by selling himself as the “continuity candidate” after Merkel instead of Laschet.
Described as capable but boring, Scholz consistently beat Laschet by wide margins in popularity.
– ‘Could turn against me’ –
As Election Day approached, Laschet’s Tories were closing the gap, with one poll placing them even a percentage point behind the SPD’s 26%.
Laschet embarked on the race for the chancellery badly bruised by a tough battle for the nomination of the conservative chancellor candidate.
Nonetheless, his party enjoyed a substantial lead ahead of the SPD as summer approached.
But Laschet was seen laughing behind President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as he paid tribute to the victims of the deadly July floods, an image that would radically turn the tide against him and his party.
As polls showed the SPD’s lead widened, the Tories turned to their biggest asset, the ever-popular Merkel.
However, the rope to the chancellor is not without risks, said political scientist Oskar Niedermayer of the Free University of Berlin.
“Merkel is still the most valued politician. But joint appearances can become a problem for Laschet because they are then immediately compared to each other,” he said.
“And so it could backfire because people might then think Merkel is more appropriate than Laschet.”
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