Scholz and Merz clash over Germany's far-right in election debate

(Patria) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday accused his election rival Friedrich Merz of breaking his word by accepting the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to back an anti-immigration motion in parliament, AFP reported.

In their first direct TV debate ahead of the February 23 vote, Scholz said Merz's tactic of accepting parliamentary votes from the AfD meant "breaking his word and a taboo".

"And therefore one cannot be sure what the future will look like when things get difficult again," said the centre-left leader. Post-war Germany had been "very well served in recent decades when democratic parties agreed not to cooperate with the extreme right," Scholz added.

Merz, who has a large lead in opinion polls two weeks before the vote, stressed that his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian allies CSU would not cooperate or govern with the anti-immigration AfD.

"I want to make it clear here once again that we will not do that," Merz said during the TV debate, adding that there was "no common ground" between his CDU and the AfD.

He stressed that we are "worlds apart on issues concerning Europe, NATO, the euro, Russia, America, there is no common ground between the AfD and the Union".

Merz said he had been forced to act quickly in parliament and accept the AfD's support following a crime that shocked Germany, a knife attack on a group in a kindergarten in which a two-year-old boy and a man who tried to help the toddlers were killed.

"I could no longer justify that to my conscience," Merz said about the possibility of waiting before launching a motion for promised crackdowns on irregular immigration.

Scholz cited progress made by his coalition government at national and EU level in controlling irregular migration, but Merz accused him of "wishful thinking" and "living in a different world" from that of German citizens.

The knife rampage was the latest in a series of deadly attacks that have darkened the mood in Germany over the arrival of millions of war refugees and other asylum seekers in recent years. But tens of thousands of people have repeatedly taken to the streets of Germany to protest against recent conservative cooperation with the AfD.

Merz, whose party is polling around 30 percent, is banking on immigration to win over voters tempted by the AfD's hardline anti-migrant policies. Critics argue that this approach will only pander to extremists in Germany, a country still trying to atone for the crimes of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

The AfD is in second place behind the CDU-CSU coalition with at least 20 percent of the vote. Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats and the Greens are polling around 15 percent support.