In their first and only expected live television debate ahead of the February 23 election, Chancellor Olaf Scholz mounted an offensive against his main rival to lead the government.
Scholz said Friedrich Merz’s tactic of accepting votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) late last month had meant “a breaking of his word and of a taboo.”
“And, therefore, one cannot be sure what the future will be like when things become difficult again,” Scholz said.
Scholz said postwar Germany had done “very well in the past decades when the democratic parties agreed not to cooperate with the extreme right.”
He said Merz’s plans to push back undocumented migrants at the border would risk “a European crisis.”
Merz said his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the allied Bavarian Christian Social Union would not, if they win the election, cooperate or rule with the anti-immigration AfD.
“I want to make it clear here once again that we will not do that,” Merz said, adding that “there is no common ground” between his CDU and the AfD.
Merz said he had been forced to act after a crime that shocked Germany — a knife attack that killed a 2-year-old boy and a man. “I could no longer justify it with my conscience,” said Merz.
The pair also clashed over Germany’s struggling economy. Merz blamed Scholz’s government for the country now “deindustrializing.”
“We are now in the third year of a recession,” Merz said. “That has never happened in Germany before. We have three million unemployed in Germany and the trend is rising.”
Scholz highlighted high energy costs caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “I did not invade Ukraine,” he said.
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