‘Bring home the bacon,’ Merkel tells voters on eve of poll

Berlin, September 23

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 on Friday 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.  AFP