Germans go to the polls Sunday. Chancellor Scholz's Social Democrats are likely to lose to the conservative CDU party, as the right-wing Alternative for Germany party is likely to make gains.

The leading candidate, Friedrich Merz, a conservative who has adopted many of the AfD’s hard-line positions on immigration, used his closing statement of the debate to promise his voters that he would never allow the AfD into his government. Under him, he said, the firewall would hold.