Voters across Germany head to polling stations on Sunday to determine the country’s next government and the chancellor who will lead it.
The election will be the first since the county reunified in 1990 that Angela Merkel will not run in as a candidate. After 16 years in the chancellery, the woman who became the defining European leader of her era will step aside once a new government is formed.
Roughly 60.4 million people in Germany are eligible to vote, though it’s unlikely all of them will be rushing to polling stations on Sunday. There’s every chance, given the coronavirus pandemic, that more will have voted by mail in advance than ever before.
Polls close at 6:00pm Paris time tonight, but it may be some time before it becomes clear who will succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor.
The chancellor is not directly elected, but chosen through a vote in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, after a government has been formed, meaning Merkel could still remain in her post for weeks if not months.
SPD’s Olaf Scholz, the most popular of the chancellor candidates, closed his campaign in his constituency of Potsdam on Saturday, repeating the party’s key social policies – including a 12 euro ($14) hourly minimum wage, no rise in the pension age and tackling a shortage of nursing staff.
He reiterated his desire to govern with the Greens. “This is my favourite coalition,” he said.
In the final days before the vote, Merkel has swung strongly behind her successor Armin Laschet, who has run a gaffe-prone and lacklustre race.
At a final rally in Laschet’s home town of Aachen on Saturday, Merkel said the election is “about keeping Germany stable”. The conservatives have been warning that Germany risks a “slide to the left” under Scholz, who has refused to fully rule out an unlikely alliance with the socialist Left party.