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.

Trump confidant and tech billionaire Elon Musk openly supports the German far-right AfD party and continues to spread false and misleading claims about elections on his platform X.